


The Hungry and the Dead

by coolbreeze1



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Ancients, Angst, Ascension, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-27
Updated: 2011-10-27
Packaged: 2017-10-25 00:20:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolbreeze1/pseuds/coolbreeze1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a devastating accident, Sheppard's team risks it all to make things right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hungry and the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: I hate to give any kind of warning that spoils too much of a story, but I feel obligated to say that the following contains a major character death, but I don't write death fic...so, temporary death? I promise, despite early appearances, this is not a death fic! Set after Season 4's "Be All My Sins Remembered."
> 
> Written for the 2009 Secret Santa exchange for wildcat88. Huge thanks to kristen999 for letting me hash out this idea with her. Huge thanks to titan5 for her feedback and encouragement throughout the writing of this - she really kept me going on this one. And finally, huge thanks to my always awesome beta, everybetty! Thank you all!!!

__

These are the clouds about the fallen sun,  
The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

 _–These Are The Clouds, W.B. Yeats_

 

 **  
_Part One_   
**

 

John crested the top of the hill first, his heart pounding in his chest and his breath coming out in deep puffs of condensed air. He bent over, resting his hands against his knees, and shot a glance at Ronon as he came charging up the incline behind him.

“Beat you,” John gasped out, shooting a grin at the other man.

“I let you win,” Ronon huffed back. He leaned against a nearby tree and shook his legs out, looking up at the dense canopy of leaves overhead as he sucked in ragged breaths.

John shook his head, too out of breath to come up with a retort. Ronon was covered in a sheen of sweat, a sloppy grin spread out across his face. The muscles in John’s thighs burned from the exertion of sprinting up the hill, but it was the good kind of burn. The kind that stretched and pulled and pushed the limits of the human body. Blood and oxygen pumped through his veins and thrummed with a heat that condensed on his skin and dissipated into the cool autumn air.

“Water?” Ronon asked, tossing John the canteen before he had a chance to answer.

He drank deeply, reveling in the cool liquid before capping the canteen and tossing it back. “Thanks.”

It took another ten minutes for McKay and Teyla to catch up. John had seated himself on a nearby boulder to wait for them, and he watched them slowly climb the hill he and Ronon had sprinted up. McKay’s voice floated up toward him, and John smiled at the litany of complaints spilling out of the man that gradually quieted the farther he climbed. Teyla was smiling patiently but when she saw John watching them, she shot him a glare.

John’s smile grew, and it wasn’t long before Teyla grinned back. She patted McKay’s back, urging him forward and ignoring whatever he was rambling on about. John’s eyes automatically drifted to her stomach and the life he knew was growing within her. It hadn’t been that many weeks since she’d told them she was pregnant.

His smile faltered at the memory. The news had been jarring, and he was a little ashamed at his reaction now. There was no question that Teyla had put him in a difficult position and should have spoken to him sooner about her pregnancy, but he could have been…more gentle. He’d sought her out later that evening to apologize, but even now the look of shocked pain on her face when he’d exploded on her in the hallway still cut deeply, and he wasn’t sure he could do or say anything to really make it up to her.

“Glad the two of you could join us,” John said, standing up as his last two teammates finally reached the top of the hill. McKay grunted, red-faced and panting, and stumbled to the rock John had just vacated. He collapsed in a heap and proceeded to fold his arms over his knees and lay his head on them.

Teyla was not out of breath, and she swatted John on the arm. The missions that she could join them on were rare now, but this one had been the perfect situation for the team to get out together and do a little bonding. The planet was no longer inhabited, and the more dangerous wildlife nowhere in the near vicinity. It was a day hike through the woods and back with a short stop to explore the crumbled ruins of a long dead city.

John gave McKay a few more minutes to rest then pulled him to his feet and prodded him forward. He had parked the jumper in a clearing about two miles from the ruins of the abandoned city that had prompted the mission in the first place, but two miles had quickly turned into something closer to three and a half once they’d gotten on the ground. The terrain was hilly and the underbrush thick in areas, forcing them to take a weaving path to their destination versus the straight shot John had initially anticipated.

“The ruins seemed a lot closer than this,” McKay piped up from in front of him. They were walking along a fairly wide path, flat enough that McKay had caught his breath again. “Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?”

John rolled his eyes. _Get lost one time…_

“Ronon is leading the way,” Teyla answered.

“Right,” McKay huffed out.

Teyla quickened her pace until she was walking by John’s side. “Do we know anything about this place?”

“Only that it’s old enough to have been around when the Ancient’s were here. Beyond that, uh…nothing.”

A pile of boulders had loomed up in the path in front of them while McKay spoke, forcing them to veer off onto a narrower path to circle the obstacle. John let Teyla go ahead of him, and he glanced around the woods for any signs of life. It was quiet, and green. Very green. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the cool, fresh air.

“Is the city Ancient then?” Teyla asked.

“Didn’t look very Ancienty from the air,” John answered. As they came around the boulders and rejoined the wider path, John spotted another clearing through the trees, long yellow-golden grass wafting in the breeze.

“Ancienty?” McKay asked, glancing back at John.

John shrugged. “You know—shiny towers and all that.” Beyond the clearing, he could see a thick forested hill rising up to a plateau, and on the plateau the faint outline of the city ruins. He probably should have parked the jumper here, not that he would ever admit that out loud. McKay would—

“Sshhh!”

Ronon’s sudden hiss brought everyone to a standstill. John raised his P-90 and flipped the safety off, cringing as McKay’s loud whisper cut through the woods.

“What is it?”

John scanned the trees for whatever it was Ronon had spotted. He reached a hand out to grab McKay and pull the scientist behind him when the woods suddenly erupted with noise. John ducked and spun around, feeling more than seeing his teammates do the same. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of dark clothes through the leaves, and then a half dozen men exploded out of the brush, weapons raised. John heard Ronon’s gun power up as the men rushed them, spears and knives raised over their heads.

They collided, thrust suddenly into hand-to-hand combat. John didn’t have time to fire his weapon before one of the men was on top of him. They crashed to the ground and rolled, and John used the momentum to continue moving away from the knife the other man was still swinging toward him. He scrambled to his feet as his attacker jumped to his and took another swipe at John with his blade. John kicked out, catching the man in the knee and felt a split second of satisfaction as the man went down with a howl before a heavy weight pounded into his back.

He landed on his chest and the air whooshed out of him. He could see McKay on the ground, grappling with another hunter, and Teyla behind him swinging a spear she must have wrested from her attacker. Ronon was nowhere in sight, but over the chaos John heard the blaster fire, and a nearby bush exploded in a blaze of red. He squirmed as the man above him shifted his weight, and he turned half on his side, throwing his arm up to block the hit he knew was coming.

The man’s expression was twisted in rage, dark stringy hair falling around the unshaven face. John grimaced at the stench of unwashed bodies and fresh sweat. The man on top of him was driving a fist toward John’s head, and John twisted again, lashing out with his own fists. He caught the man in the throat with one fist and guided the punch directed at him enough to the side that it only brushed his cheek. With a scream, he threw his leg up and wrapped it around the hunter, shifting his weight until he was no longer pinned.

He rolled to his knees and spotted a knife just a few inches from his hand. He grabbed it and looked up. His first attacker was hobbling toward him, a rock raised over his head. As he lunged then dropped against another burst of fire from Ronon’s blaster, John caught a flash of movement in the air above him—a blue sphere hanging between the trees, too round to be naturally occurring. And _moving._ It hovered, sliding from side to side as if looking for the best vantage point to view the fight. A bead of light at its center sparked brighter.

John lifted his arm to point at the sphere, but before he could say anything, the bead expanded, enveloping his world in a flash of white.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

One second Ronon was firing his gun at the man charging toward Sheppard, and the next he was lying on his back staring up at the sky. He was still holding his blaster. He could feel its heavy weight in the palm of his hand. The forest, filled with shouts and screams only a split second before, was now utterly still.

A tree branch far above him swayed in the light breeze. He flexed his feet, curling his toes. No pain or numbness—that was a good sign. He rolled his head from side to side and then carefully lifted it up to look down the length of his body. When he saw no blood or obvious signs of injury, he rolled over onto his knees and pushed himself up.

They’d been hiking through the quiet forest all morning, and he’d seen no sign of any animals bigger than his foot. After they’d rounded the large rocks, he’d heard someone off in the bushes next to them at the same as he’d smelled them, and he’d had just enough time to warn the others when a half dozen men swarmed around them. The men had been armed but not with anything that could withstand his gun. He shook his head; they’d been winning. He’d seen Teyla take the one attacking her out and move to help McKay, who’d managed to hold his own for longer than Ronon would have expected.

Sheppard had taken out one guy before being tackled by a second, but he’d managed to get the upper hand on him, too. Ronon had spun around to see the first guy dive toward Sheppard again and he had dropped him with a single shot, and then…

Then nothing.

Then he’d woken up staring at the trees. He jumped to his feet, searching for his teammates and saw McKay rolling onto his side a few feet away. Through the trees, Ronon saw the large clearing with the outline of the ruins on the hill above it. The men who’d attacked them—all six of them—were sprinting across the grass. While he couldn’t see their faces, from behind they looked terrified, running at full speed without a single glance behind them.

“Everyone okay?” he called out.

“What the hell was that?” McKay asked. He’d rolled from his back to his side to his knees, and was now gingerly pushing himself up. “Ow, my head.”

McKay had a smudge of dirt along his cheek but no apparent bruises or knife wounds. Or spear wounds. The men who’d attacked them had been hunters. Had the team scared off their prey and they’d attacked in retaliation? It seemed an odd response, but Ronon had run into plenty of situations that didn’t make logical sense to him but seemed perfectly normal to the people whose world he was on. Except that both Sheppard and McKay had said this world was uninhabited. He was sure Sheppard had run a scan of the planet as they’d emerged from the space gate just to be on the safe side.

“Teyla?” he called out, feeling a pang of apprehension. He couldn’t see her, and he realized he and McKay were a few feet off the wide path. She and Sheppard must have stayed on the path while he and McKay had ended up in the deeper underbrush off to the side.

“I am fine,” she called out, and Ronon felt relief flood through him. He knew Teyla could fight off anyone as well if not better than him, but her pregnancy added an extra element of risk and he wasn’t sure how to take that into account yet.

He heard her moving around behind the tree trunk and he glanced back at the clearing. The hunters were on the far side now, almost too small to pick out if he hadn’t known they were there. McKay was standing up and wincing as he pressed his hand to the back of his head.

“John?” Teyla’s voice floated through the woods, now utterly quiet once again.

“Well, that’s just a pleasant addition to my day,” McKay mumbled, still rubbing his head.

Ronon grinned. McKay was fine. He stepped toward the clearing, wondering if he should pursue their attackers, but he stopped when he heard Teyla again.

“John?”

Sheppard didn’t answer. Was he hurt? He might have bumped his head like McKay appeared to have done. Ronon didn’t feel any worse after the fight, not even bruised. He made his way toward Teyla and Sheppard, following the faint sounds of rustling clothes.

“John! Ronon!”

Fear blossomed in Ronon’s chest, and he felt his heart rate pick up. He ran around the tree trunk and saw Teyla on her hands and knees, bending over Sheppard. Sheppard was on his side facing away from him, but even as he approached, Teyla rolled him onto his back and pressed her ear to his face.

“He’s not breathing!” she cried out as Ronon dropped to Sheppard’s other side. He heard McKay running through the bushes toward them. Teyla’s fingers were digging into the side of Sheppard’s neck and Ronon blanched at the gray pallor. “No pulse. There is no pulse.”

“What? How did that happen?” McKay dropped to his knees at Sheppard’s feet.

“CPR. We must—”

“On it,” Ronon answered. Panic thrummed just below the surface but he forced it back. He tugged on Sheppard’s thick tac vest but the zipper stuck halfway down. Without thinking, he drew his knife and sliced through the thinner material on the side of the vest and pulled it away. Teyla had moved closer to his head and was tilting it back as she prepared to breathe for him. The knife ripped through the fabric of Sheppard’s t-shirt, starting a tear, and Ronon used his hands to rip it off and bare his chest just as Teyla breathed out.

His eyes raked across Sheppard’s body—no blood, no obvious injuries. Sweat was dripping from Ronon’s forehead and he hadn’t even started working. Sheppard’s ribcage expanded then dropped, then expanded and dropped again as Teyla gave her two rescue breaths. They waited for a response, but when Sheppard continued to lie limp and lifeless beneath their hands, Ronon pressed his fingers into his chest, finding the edge of the sternum. The first aid and CPR classes he’d had to take soon after he’d come to Atlantis slammed into him, and he heard the medic’s even tone explaining each step.

He began compressions, intertwining his fingers and forcing his eyes away from Sheppard’s face. Ronon had seen plenty of dead bodies, first as a soldier on Sateda and then as a runner, and Sheppard looked dead. _Was_ dead. He bent his head forward and let his hair fall around his face. If he couldn’t see Sheppard, then this was no different than doing compression on the test dummies he’d trained on.

“Rodney, the jumper! We need to get him to Atlantis.”

McKay started at Teyla’s voice and jerked to his feet. “Okay.”

“Hurry!”

“Okay, okay.”

“Go,” Ronon breathed out to Teyla. He sat back on his heels but kept his hands over Sheppard’s chest. Ronon glanced up at McKay, who was backing up and digging into his vest for his life-signs detector. “McKay, be careful out there. I’d come with you but…”

“No, stay here. Help Teyla,” McKay answered. He glanced down at the life-signs detector and grimaced at whatever the screen was showing him.

“Hurry, Rodney!” Teyla said as she sat up.

Ronon didn’t see the scientist spin around and run back in the direction of the jumper, his concentration once again focused on pumping Sheppard’s chest. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. He counted softly to himself, glancing up on the fifteenth one and signaling to Teyla to breathe. Sheppard’s skin, if anything, looked paler, and Ronon felt a cold, almost numb sensation sweep through him.

“Sheppard, buddy—come on!” he urged. His hands rose slightly as Teyla filled Sheppard’s lungs, and he bit back the urge to shake the unresponsive man, as if he could bring him back through sheer willpower.

He pumped again. The muscles in his arms were tense, and the adrenaline inundating his system wanted him to move faster. He chanted an old training cadence under his breath, using the rhythm of the words to keep his compressions on track. He paused just long enough for Teyla to give two rescue breaths, then began the metrical dance again.

“Come on, Sheppard,” he whispered. He’d lost track of how much time had passed, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Teyla breathed two more times and sat up. She dug her hands into the pulse point in Sheppard’s neck then looked at Ronon and shook her head.

“Switch,” she called out.

Ronon slid up to Sheppard’s head immediately, and now he had to look at his friend’s face. Sheppard’s eyelids were closed, the muscles in his face relaxed in death. His skin was pale gray but darker under his eyes, and his mouth hung slightly open. Teyla picked up the chest compressions in a steady rhythm, and Sheppard’s head rocked with the movement.

When she stopped, Ronon bent down automatically, tilting Sheppard’s head back and pinching his nose. He covered his friend’s mouth with his own and breathed in one fluid motion, seeing Sheppard’s chest rise out of the corner of his eye. Teyla’s hands rested lightly on his chest, not quite covering the growing bruises from their resuscitation efforts.

He breathed again and then jerked his head toward Teyla. Sheppard’s head lolled to the side as she began another set of compressions and Ronon leaned down, his lips almost brushing Sheppard’s ear.

“Breathe, buddy. You can do this. Breathe, John, breathe.”

He whispered the desperate words over and over again. Somehow Sheppard would hear him, and he would fight. Sheppard always fought. He fought more than any other man Ronon had ever met. At Teyla’s nod, he breathed again, feeling warm skin beneath his hands and lips despite the corpse-like pallor. As he lifted his head, he found himself staring into his friend’s face. The woods seemed to disappear around them, spinning into nonexistence. It was just him, and Teyla, and Sheppard. Ronon peeled back Sheppard’s eyelids and shuddered at the sightless, empty gaze staring back at him. He pressed his fingers into Sheppard’s eyes, drawing the lids closed again and turned away, sick.

“Ronon?” Teyla was panting through another series of compressions and Ronon looked up at her. Sweat poured from her face, her cheeks flushed red from the exertion of CPR. He filled Sheppard’s lungs again with precious air expelled from his own and had to close his eyes when the forest floor suddenly tilted around them.

Breathe. He had to breathe, not just for Sheppard but for himself as well. He dragged an arm across his forehead at the sweat dripping down his face and dug his fingers into Sheppard’s neck.

Nothing.

He shifted his hand, pushing harder under his friend’s jaw then moving it down his neck into lax muscles. If anyone were to suddenly walk up on them, they’d probably think he was choking the life out of the man on the ground. He shook his head. What was he doing wrong? Why couldn’t he find a pulse?

“Anything?” Teyla’s voice was high, ringed with the same desperation twisting through Ronon.

“No, nothing!”

They switched again. “Dammit, Sheppard. Don’t give up!” Ronon yelled as he pounded against Sheppard’s chest. He felt the ribcage give more than it had been doing before and wondered if either he or Teyla had broken a rib. Probably. It was impossible to do CPR correctly and not break a rib.

But they weren’t doing it correctly. They couldn’t be. Sheppard still wasn’t breathing.

“How long has it been?” Teyla was breathing hard, her hands pressed against the ground on either side of her, trying to keep her upright. She’d gone from flushed to too pale, and Ronon worried she was about to pass out on him.

“Don’t know,” he answered being compressions. When he reached the end of his set, he tapped his radio. “McKay—”

“ _Running, I’m running,_ ” McKay’s breathless voice came across immediately. His voice jarred at every frantic stride.

Teyla sat up and Ronon resumed the rhythmic abuse of pounding his hands into Sheppard’s sternum.

 _Too long, too long, too long._ The words echoed through his mind, setting the rhythm for every blow, every crunch. The bruise was a puddle of ink, growing darker and spreading as the seconds ticked past. Another rib gave, and Ronon grimaced at the muted crack under his palms.

“Rodney, there is a clearing just a few steps from here.”

“ _I remember._ ”

“Bring the jumper here.”

“ _Is Sheppard okay?_ ”

Ronon heard the conversation but couldn’t focus. The words tumbled around him, lost in the battle beneath his palms.

“ _Guys? How is he? Please tell me he’s okay._ ”

Ronon’s arms folded on him and he pitched forward, hitting the ground on the other side of Sheppard’s body with his face. He grunted, pushing himself up again on shaking arms. The muscles in his neck and back burned. The flames ran across his shoulders, down his biceps and to his forearms, mocking his weakness.

“Still trying,” he gasped out, surprised at how badly his voice shook. _Exhaustion,_ he thought. _It’s the exhaustion._

He had no idea how long they’d been kneeling in that little grove of trees. It could have been minutes or hours. A lifetime. Teyla checked for a pulse for the umpteenth time, and shook her head. They switched places again, awkwardly now as their own bodies began to betray them and give in to the physical demands of what they were doing. Lines of sweat or tears—Ronon could not tell which—had carved paths through the dust and dirt on Teyla’s face.

The problem with doing CPR for an extended period of time was fatigue. Ronon remembered hearing that in the training class, but he hadn’t realized until now just how tired he’d become. He’d been a runner, dammit. He’d gone for days without food or sleep eluding his tireless predators. What could be more exhausting than that? He bent over, pinching Sheppard’s nose and forcing his lungs to expel air slowly into the other man.

He hadn’t moved. Sheppard hadn’t moved the entire time they’d been doing this. Were they pushing in the wrong place? Or not hard enough? Or too hard? CPR became less and less effective the longer it was performed because the person giving the CPR became less effective. _Weak,_ Ronon had translated in his mind at the same time as he’d thought that would never be him. Someone would not die because he hadn’t been strong enough. Because he’d gotten _tired._

“ _Guys, I’m almost there. How is he?_ ” McKay’s voice came across in stilted gasps. He was still running.

They’d hiked for over an hour, but McKay had been moving particularly slowly today. Too many days locked up in his lab. Normally Sheppard would have egged him on, forced him to walk faster, but Ronon knew Teyla’s pregnancy had thrown him off too, and he was just as uncertain about how much he could push Teyla now that she wasn’t just Teyla. And neither of them could ask her either—they’d decided together that that conversation would just end badly for all of them.

“ _Is he breathing…at all? Guys? Teyla?_ ”

“We’re a little busy, McKay,” Ronon muttered. He kept his hands on Sheppard’s head, holding it in place as Teyla pounded against his chest. He lifted his arm again to wipe the sweat off his face and grimaced at how badly his hand was shaking.

“ _It’s been…forty-five minutes…you guys have…been doing that for…forty-five—oh, crap._ ”

Ronon jerked his head up at the sudden change in tone. “McKay!”

“Ssshhh,” McKay hissed back. The radio cut out abruptly, and Ronon and Teyla sat in stunned silence.

Ronon blinked, realizing they’d stopped working on Sheppard. He swallowed, crawling forward and grabbing Teyla’s arm. He could feel her shaking under his grasp and her breathing was ragged. He glanced at Sheppard and felt his stomach flip, sudden nausea building in the back of his throat.

“We can’t give up,” Teyla whispered, but she hadn’t moved.

Ronon nudged her until she finally moved out of the way and began compressions once again. “You hear that buddy?” he yelled through the burning pain in his arms. “Fight!”

Another five minutes passed, at least. They switched again, then again. Black spots were beginning to creep around the edges of Ronon’s vision and he shook his head. He breathed in as deeply as possible and felt a modicum of relief when the fresh oxygen chased back the encroaching darkness.

“ _You guys?_ ” McKay’s voice was so soft Ronon almost missed it.

“Rodney! Are you okay?” Teyla snapped out, straightening. Ronon continued to press against Sheppard’s chest, now mottled black and blue and purple. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Teyla staring into the trees in the direction of the jumper as she listened for McKay’s response. Sheppard’s head thumped against the side of her leg every time he pushed down.

“Come on, buddy,” he muttered.

“ _You know how we left the jumper invisible so no one would notice it? It’s covered in leaves. I could see it perfectly outlined._ ”

“So?” Ronon asked, pausing to let Teyla minister two more breaths.

“ _So there’s a bunch of people wandering around it, poking it with sticks and spears. They look like the guys who attacked us._ ”

“Stay out of sight, Rodney,” Teyla whispered, frantic.

Ronon’s arms were numb all the way up to his shoulders. He hadn’t noticed when that had happened.

“ _Hello? Those elementary school skills of hiding from bullies are paying off again. I’m out of sight, tracking them on the life-signs detector._ ”

He saw his hands pressing against gray skin, saw the ribcage sink a couple of inches then flex up again. The chest and his arms moved in unison, but it was almost like he was watching it from far away. Like it was a film. Disconnected.

“Rodney, be safe. If something happens to you…we are too far away to help,” Teyla said.

There was a pause as Ronon switched places again with Teyla. He pressed his hand to Sheppard’s forehead and felt the warm skin. How fast did dead bodies lose their temperature? He gagged at the thought and turned away, burying his face into the side of his shoulder. Too fast, too fast.

“ _How’s Sheppard? Is he…_ ”

McKay didn’t finish, and neither he nor Teyla answered the unspoken question. What could they say?

“ _I think they’re leaving! I think…shit. Never mind. They’re just circling the clearing._ ”

Ronon bent over again, pressing his forehead into Sheppard’s and whispering into his ear. The words tumbled out of his mouth, incoherent at best, but somehow Sheppard would hear him and understand. He _had_ to hear him.

“ _What the hell? Get away from the damn jumper!_ ”

McKay’s sudden whispered hiss erupted in Ronon’s ear halfway through a rescue breath and he jerked up. The air hadn’t even made it past Sheppard’s throat. He steeled himself and tilted Sheppard’s head back again. This time both breaths expanded in the otherwise motionless lungs.

Teyla began the battering compressions again but halfway through the set, her arms collapsed. Ronon watched her fall forward. She seemed to move in slow motion as she folded over Sheppard’s body. Once down, she did not get up, and Ronon could see her jerking as she gasped.

“Teyla?” He heard himself call out to her but couldn’t bring himself to do anything else. To move. To switch places.

“ _They’re leaving! I’m on my way to the jumper…I’m almost there! I’m almost…oh, God! It took me over an hour to get here..._ ”

Ronon forced his body to crawl toward Teyla. He was on the verge of collapsing himself and the trees and bushes around him kept swimming in and out of focus. He grabbed onto Teyla’s shoulder and pulled her up.

She immediately reached for Sheppard’s neck, burrowing fingertips into his carotid artery, but Ronon already knew what she’d find. Or not find. A few seconds later, she lifted a shaking hand to brush his hair away from his face.

“ _Hang on, guys. I’ll be there in…in like ten minutes. No, five minutes. I’ll be there in five minutes._ ”

Through the numbness and fatigue, Ronon felt his heart begin to pound. He grabbed the hand laying in the dirt by his side, the fingers curled slightly. The black wristband was covered in dirt and small dead leaves, and he picked at the debris. They had stopped CPR, but Ronon still couldn’t catch his breath. A vise tightened around his head. Teyla was crying now, the tears streaming from her eyes and dropping from her cheeks, and Ronon felt a wall of emotions bearing down on him, battering against his chest the way he had battered Sheppard’s.

He pulled his radio out of his ear. McKay was still babbling, trying to get to the jumper and asking them what was going on, if Sheppard was okay, if they were still doing CPR. Teyla pressed her head against Sheppard’s and began to rock in silent anguish. Ronon turned away. He couldn’t watch. His grip on his own emotions was already tenuous.

And then his hold broke and snapped out of his control. He let loose a scream—a wild animal roar coiling through his gut. The sound echoed through the trees, mingling with the flaps of wings from birds startled out of a daze.

McKay’s voice was high pitched and panicked. In the silence following his scream, Ronon could hear him in the radio earpiece in his hand. Teyla had wrapped her arms around Sheppard and lifted him up, hugging him in a tight embrace. She seemed oblivious to Ronon’s screaming and McKay’s rambling.

Ronon fumbled with the ear piece and caught the tail end of McKay’s one-sided conversation.

“ _…at the jumper now. It will only be a couple more minutes. How is he? Is he…Are you still…_ ”

Ronon sucked in a deep breath, wondering what he could possible say when Teyla answered instead.

“Yes, Rodney. Come as quickly as you can.”

Ronon jerked his head around in surprise. Teyla was lowering Sheppard back to the ground and tilting his head back. One of Sheppard’s arms had fallen across his chest when she’d picked him up, and she moved it to the side now. She leaned over and breathed into him.

“Teyla…” Ronon started, staring mesmerized at the lone rise and fall of Sheppard’s ribcage.

“We can’t give up yet,” she whispered back. “If Rodney returns and sees we have stopped, I do not know if he…” She shook her head. “We have to continue.”

“Teyla, he’s gone.”

She looked up at him, her eyes bright. The tears had stopped and the muscles in her face had grown stiff. “I know, but for Rodney’s sake…”

Ronon tried to imagine what McKay would be thinking, what he would see when he raced back toward them. He had to know. Intellectually, he knew more about CPR than all of them combined. But if he thought they’d given up on Sheppard…

“ _I’m almost there. We have a defibrillator in the jumper. And a med kit._ ”

Ronon dragged himself back to Sheppard’s body and laid a hand on his chest. Sheppard looked like he’d been pummeled repeatedly with a club, and in a sense he had. A wave of guilt flushed through Ronon and he grabbed Sheppard’s hand.

“Sorry, buddy,” he murmured, wrapping Sheppard’s fingers around his hand. He heard the jumper fly overhead, vibrating the leaves around them, and he let the hand drop to the ground. He fingered the bruises on Sheppard’s chest, finding the correct positioning once again.

He froze, his arms held out stiffly.

“Ronon?” Teyla whispered. In his peripheral vision, he saw her glance toward the clearing where the jumper had landed but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the black bruise bleeding out under the skin around his hands.

Ronon swallowed, willing his hands to move, to pump Sheppard’s chest again like they’d done for the last hour, but nothing responded. He couldn’t move. He heard the hiss of the back hatch of the jumper open, and then McKay was pounding through the grass and underbrush toward them. Teyla reached over and pressed her hand against his, and the movement triggered his arms into motion. He pressed against the ribcage—not hard, but hard enough to look like he was still trying.

“Oh, my God.”

McKay burst through the trees, the med kit in one hand and the defibrillator in the other, but he came to a standstill at the sight of them. Ronon looked up just as McKay’s hands went lax and the bags fell at his feet.

Teyla was crying soundlessly again, and McKay staggered to Sheppard’s other side, dropping to his knees. His face was a sharp contrast to Sheppard’s—bright red from his run to the jumper. Ronon continued to pump slowly, and now that he’d started he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to stop.

“He’s…he’s…”

“Rodney, he—” Teyla started then shook her head. She too seemed unwilling or unable to let go of the hold she had on Sheppard’s head. “We could not—”

McKay swallowed, and for a second Ronon thought his teammate was going to throw up. Instead, he reached a hand out and felt for the nonexistent pulse. Ronon felt bones crackling beneath him, broken ribs grating against each other. He hadn’t bothered counting the compressions. He just kept going.

“What…what about the defibrillator? The med kit—it must have…something. Epinephrine and…and…what’s the other one? There’s another one. Epi-epinephrine.”

The first aid kit and defibrillator were only a few feet away, but no one moved. Ronon felt himself slide into a rhythm and it was almost comforting. Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. As long as he kept moving, it wasn’t over.

“Atropine,” McKay said after a long pause. “Epinephrine and atropine. Defibrillator. We just have to get…get some…electrical activity—v-fib or-or-or tachycardia…we should—we have to—”

“Rodney, it has been too long.”

Teyla’s voice was soft, but it blazed through Ronon’s chest like a shotgun blast. McKay flinched, shaking his head.

“No, we can’t. We have to try. We…Move, Ronon.” McKay was suddenly staring at him and pulling on his arms, but they were lead weights, fused to Sheppard’s body. Down, up. Down, up. Down, up. McKay grabbed onto his coat and shook him. “Ronon—move!”

He was panicking, desperate. He grabbed at Ronon’s arms again but ended up with his hands over Ronon’s. Down. Up. Down. Up. McKay was trying to push faster and harder, all the while screaming at Ronon to get out of his way.

Teyla’s scream accomplished what nothing else seemed to have been capable of doing. McKay and Ronon both froze and stared at her in shock. She was trembling and looked ready to collapse, but then something in her expression shifted visibly. She crawled toward Ronon first and tugged on his arms, and Ronon was surprised to see his hands lift almost effortlessly from Sheppard’s torso. She placed a hand over McKay’s next.

“No,” he whispered.

“Rodney, stop.”

“No.”

“Rodney, please.” She tugged on his hands and they too came away without a fight. McKay fell back, his entire body deflating.

They sat around Sheppard for several minutes. A breeze wafted through the trees, cooling the sweat covering Ronon’s skin. A distant bird chirped and whistled. Ronon felt the gravity of this world pulling him down, pressing against him from all sides, and he wondered if he’d be able to stand up and walk the short distance to the jumper. He had never felt so exhausted, or so drained, in his life.

“I don’t even remember what happened,” McKay suddenly said. Ronon blinked at the memories that assaulted him—hiking, the hunters, the fight. Sheppard lying on his side, dead. He dragged a hand over his face, realizing he had no idea how Sheppard had died either. He’d just been…dead.

“We need to bring John home,” Teyla whispered.

It took two of them to carry Sheppard’s body to the jumper. He and McKay stumbled through the woods with their burden between them while Teyla picked up the discarded med kit and defibrillator case and the remains of Sheppard’s vest and t-shirt. Ronon’s arms shook the entire time. By the time they walked into the back of the jumper, he was sweating almost as much as he had been when he’d been doing CPR at full strength. They set Sheppard on the bench and Ronon straightened him out, relieved that his arms had held up and that he hadn’t dropped his friend.

McKay hovered behind him, his own uncertainty about what to do bleeding into the air. When Teyla finally stumbled into the jumper, she looked like she was on the verge of passing out, and McKay darted toward her to grab the bags out of her hands. Ronon stayed on his knees next to the bench. He’d crossed Sheppard’s hands over his stomach, and he held them in place now, not sure he could stand up even if he wanted to.

Without a word, McKay and Teyla made their way to the front of the jumper, and a second later the back hatch slid closed with a hiss. The jumper was plunged into shadow, dispelled only when McKay powered up the craft and the overhead light came on. Sheppard looked worse—if that was in any way possible—in the artificial light of the jumper. _Should he cover him?_

Ronon thought suddenly of what would happen when they arrived back in Atlantis—of the gaping stares as people boarded the jumper and wheeled the body of the military commander of Atlantis through the hallways. Sheppard wouldn’t want that; he’d hate the attention. His vest had been flung on the floor and Ronon reached over for it. He dug into one of the pockets and pulled out the small silvery packet that contained an emergency blanket. It would have to do.

The jumper was flying through the atmosphere as Ronon flung the blanket open. The crinkling of material seemed extra loud in the quiet space. He glanced up at McKay and Teyla’s back and was grateful to see their attention focused on the windshield in front of them. Clouds and blue skies turned to the starry vista of space. He was alone with Sheppard for the moment, maybe for the last time.

As Ronon pulled the blanket up over Sheppard’s face, the jumper shuddered, almost knocking him over. He scrambled to catch his balance and looked up again at the cockpit. Lights were flashing all over the dashboard, and McKay’s hands flew across the console in all directions. The ship shuddered again, like someone had reached out of space and grabbed their tiny craft in a fist. Alarms blared, piercing the silence.

“Rodney?” Teyla cried out.

“I don’t know!”

His hands moved faster, and a diagnostic screen popped up in front of them. Ronon could make no sense of the data scrolling by. Another rumbling jolt sent him flying backward, rolling on the ground and smacking his head into the other bench. More alarms shrieked, and he could smell something burning.

He glanced over at Sheppard and saw that one of his arms had slid off the bench and was now dangling off the side. With a pained grunt, Ronon pushed himself up and crawled over to him. The jumper was shaking continuously now, and the smell of smoke grew stronger.

“McKay!” he yelled out as he grabbed Sheppard’s arm and set it back on the bench. He kept one hand on his friend’s body as he turned toward his other two teammates.

“Initial dampeners are out. And engines!”

“Can we reach the gate?” Teyla was gripping the front console to keep herself upright. Beyond the windscreen, the stars shone calm and bright.

“I don’t—” Another wailing alarm cut through the cacophony of sound and McKay stiffened. “The proximity alarm! There’s something out there!”

“What is it?” Teyla asked, trying to lean forward to look out the windshield without falling out of her chair in the process.

“I don’t know. I can’t…Oh, God—it’s huge.”

“What’s going on?” Ronon roared as the jumper pitched to the side. He was flung forward onto Sheppard and had a brief second to realize he was crushing his friend, and then the jumper was hurled in the opposite direction. Ronon fell backward, bringing Sheppard with him. He landed on the floor of the jumper, bouncing as the ship continued to twist and tremble. Sheppard landed on top of him and Ronon latched onto him, wrapping his arms around his chest and pinning him in place. If they were going to be tossed around the jumper, they would do it together.

He closed his eyes, blocking out the alarms and screams of panic emanating from somewhere above him. When the jumper was suddenly jerked downward, it took Ronon a moment to realize he was in mid-air. He had one last thought that this couldn’t end well for any of them before the floor rushed back up and slammed into the back of his head.

* * *

 **Part Two**

Teyla woke up to a bluish-green ceiling and a soft bed underneath her. Atlantis? Had it all been a dream? She listened for the sounds she had grown used to after so many years in the city of the Ancestors and frowned when all she heard was a faint vibration.

She turned her head to look around the room. It was sparsely furnished—just the bed, a table and two chairs. The design reminded her of Atlantis, and yet… It wasn’t her room, or the infirmary, or any room she remembered seeing before. She pushed herself up until she was sitting and closed her eyes at the stiff muscles. Hot pain lanced through her arms and shoulders, shooting down her back.

So it hadn’t been a dream. The memory of waking up and finding John next to her, ashen and not breathing, slammed into her and she bit her lip at the sharp pain clawing at her chest. She could feel the hour of intense CPR in her entire body, all the way down to her knuckles and she could almost feel the warmth of his skin, taunting her again.

“Enough,” she breathed out. She groaned as she swung her legs over the side. Her head felt heavy, like she had overslept, and she wondered how long she’d been lying in the bed. She was wearing nothing but her pants and brown woven shirt; whoever had taken her weapons had also seen fit to remove her boots and belt. She shook her head. This was the second instance in a very short span of time that she’d woken up without remembering passing out or falling asleep.

Along the far wall was a large blue panel that looked very similar to the television screens from Earth. She stood, ignoring how her muscles pulled when she moved, and reached a hand out toward the panel. The material was soft like a gel. Not like any screen she had ever encountered, and she didn’t remember seeing this type of decoration on Atlantis. The feeling that she was somewhere else renewed itself with intensity.

Her last memory was of being in the jumper. Something had been approaching them, but Rodney had not known what. She vaguely recalled being thrown from her seat in the jumper, but she didn’t think she’d hit her head. Rodney had still been in his seat, and Ronon in the back with John. Where were they now? Had they also woken up in this place? She felt her heart begin to pound as she more fully grasped her situation. Had they been captured? It seemed the logical conclusion. But who? And what did they want?

A door sat in the center of the third wall and she walked up to it. When it slid open at her approach she jumped back. Certainly the room was much more comfortable than their usual prison cell, but an unlocked door? It shut as she moved back, and she approached it a little more cautiously. It slid open again, as responsive as any of the doors on Atlantis. She stepped up to the frame and peered out into the hallway.

No guards. No sign of anyone, actually. She stepped into the hall expecting the sudden blare of an alarm, but nothing happened. She felt suddenly alone—isolated in this strange place. Its similarity to Atlantis was stronger in the hallway, and more unsettling. Where was she? Where were Ronon and Rodney? John was…John was beyond their help, but she would not leave this place without him either.

Her room was at the far end of a hallway and she walked its length, running her hand along the wall. She found two more rooms identical to the one she had woken up in, but they had both been empty. At the first junction, she turned left and walked the length of another hallway. She quickened her pace as she passed more empty rooms and no sign of her teammates and eventually wove her way back to where she’d started.

The blue gel panels ran through all of the corridors. She reached out toward one of them and was surprised to feel it grow warm under her palm. Was it more than a decoration then? As if in answer to her question, a light sparked deep within it then shot into the adjacent panel. Teyla followed the white line, and the ball of light shot ahead to the next one.

She hesitated, not sure if she should follow this blindly. The light moved again, a line of white trailing in its path. What else could she do? She would have to move carefully. She walked to the end of the hall and paused, turning toward the right when the small sparkling star jumped in a new direction.

The light led her into a small closet, and she recognized it as a transporter a second later. She hesitated again but eventually stepped into it. The room flashed and the doors slid open, but she stayed out of sight, straining her ears. From what she could see of the hallway, it was identical to the level she’d just left.

“Teyla?”

The voice was soft but instantly recognizable. She felt relief wash out of her as she stepped into the hallway and rushed toward Ronon. He stood a few feet away from the transporter, his body tense but relaxing visibly as she came into view. She threw her arms around him and pressed her head against his chest. He was safe, which meant there was a good chance that Rodney was as well. The feeling of not being alone in this strange place was almost overwhelming.

“You okay?” Ronon asked, pushing her back enough to look down at her face.

She nodded. “Yes, I am fine. Have you seen anyone?”

“No.” He glanced around the hall as Teyla pulled herself away. “What is this place?”

“I do not know. My last memory before waking here is of the jumper.”

“Me too,” he said. He patted his hands down his shirt. “They took all my weapons. And my leather coat. And boots.”

“Mine as well. We should look for Rodney.”

They began a sweep of the hallways, but Teyla soon discovered that Ronon’s level was much like her own—corridor after corridor of empty rooms. They stopped at the next junction in frustration. The maze of identical hallways would be so easy to get lost in, and she wasn’t very confident in her ability to find the transporter again.

In the end, Rodney led them right to him. They heard his voice echoing from the hall off to their left, yelling a string of obscenities. It grew louder as they jogged toward him, finally leading them to a closed door just like every other door they’d seen. Ronon stepped up to it, and Teyla caught a glimpse of a leg diving to the side as it opened. She could hear the smile on Ronon’s face as he called out to their teammate.

“McKay.”

Rodney stumbled into sight, pure relief in his expression. He was also missing his boots, vest and jacket, and his t-shirt was only half-tucked into his BDU pants. “Oh, thank God! I thought you were coming to kill me. How did you escape?”

Ronon crossed his arms, surveying the room. “The doors aren’t locked,” he answered.

“What?”

“There’s no one here.”

“That we have encountered,” Teyla added, stepping up to Rodney and wrapping him in an embrace. Rodney stiffened but relaxed quickly and gave her an awkward pat on the back. “Are you alright?”

“I’ve been kidnapped. Again!”

“Let’s go,” Ronon said. He spun around and walked back into the hallway.

“Is it safe? Where are we going? What if whoever took us doesn’t want us wandering around? And where’s the jumper? We’re not going anywhere without the jumper.”

Ronon ignored him, striding forward down the hall. Teyla grabbed Rodney’s arm and they jogged to keep up. She had no intention of sitting in one of the rooms and waiting for something to happen, but wandering the hallways without any sense of where they were going did not seem like an effective plan either.

“Think this is that old city we were going to explore? Like an underground facility or something?” Ronon asked.

Teyla glanced around. The idea had not occurred to her, but it was possible they’d been transported somewhere below the surface. She had seen no windows anywhere. Perhaps the ruins were Ancient after all, despite their lack of shiny towers, as John had put it. Pain twisted in her chest at the memory of that earlier conversation and she choked it back.

“No,” Rodney answered decisively, pulling Teyla back into the present.

Ronon turned to look at him. “How do you know?”

“We’re on a ship?”

Teyla started. _A ship?_

Ronon stopped walking. “How do you know that?”

“Can’t you feel it?” He held his hands out to his side as if that explained everything.

Teyla closed her eyes, stretching her senses to feel whatever it was Rodney had felt instantly. She remembered the faint vibration she’d heard when she’d first woken up. It was fainter here, but…it was still there. She reached hand out to the wall and felt a hum behind the metal.

“When we were in the jumper, the proximity alarm—” she started.

Rodney nodded. “Probably this ship.”

“We must find the jumper.”

Rodney glanced up and down the hallway. “Have you…have you guys found John?”

Ronon’s face darkened and he turned away. Teyla felt her heart leap in her chest and she took a deep breath as she shook her head. The search for Ronon and Rodney and the relief at finding them alive had made it…maybe not easy, but imperative that she push away the memories of what had happened on the planet. Now that she knew they were both safe, that task was growing increasingly more difficult.

Ronon began walking again, though more slowly, and no one said anything else. They covered every conceivable hallway and, in the end, found their way back to the transporter. Again, Teyla was struck by the recklessness of stepping into the small space and letting it whisk her off to some unknown destination, but the jumper was clearly not on this level and she decided that left them with very few options. At least they were together.

They stepped into the transporter. It was smaller than the ones she was used to on Atlantis and the three of them had to cram together to fit. She was closest to the map that was more a set of lines and boxes than any clear picture of where they might be. Even staring at it, she had no idea what the ship looked like, how big it was, or where they were at within its hull.

As she lifted her hand to tap a random location, a small blip appeared on the screen. She paused, wondering if she should again blindly follow the light. It had led her straight to Ronon, though. Would it do the same with John? With any luck, John was still with the jumper. Before she could talk herself out of it, she jabbed the destination and closed her eyes as the transporter flashed and delivered them to the new level.

The doors opened up into another hallway, again identical to all the others. Ronon jumped out first, and while he was weaponless, he looked ferocious enough that he could have been armed with a dozen blasters and not scared potential attackers any more. Rodney stumbled out a few seconds later, his head swiveling right and left, and Teyla followed close on his heels.

Again, the hall was empty, but a spark of light appeared in the blue gel panel in front of them. They waited until it jumped into the adjacent panel, and then as one began to follow it along. It took them on a winding course through the corridors, and Teyla felt like it was leading them in circles, taking them across hallways they’d already walked. From the scowl on Ronon’s face, he looked like he was growing just as frustrated with their lack of progress.

The spark of light suddenly stopped in a panel next to a door, and Teyla noticed it had grown a little in size. It looked like a ball of electricity, the currents twisting and spinning around each other deep within the gel. She reached a hand out and pressed her fingers into the blue panel. It was warm, almost hot. She pressed harder but the gel only gave about half an inch before her hand stopped, the surface impenetrable.

The door next to her slid open, jarring her attention away from the light. She leaned over to peer into the room, feeling her teammates doing the same thing, and gasped at the sight in front of her.

The room was different than the endless bedrooms she’d already discovered. It was completely bare of furniture with one large blue panel covering the back wall, but she hardly noticed as she raced the few steps across its empty space.

John hung suspended in the center of the panel, lying horizontally and buried in the gel. He was at least a foot deep and illuminated, although Teyla couldn’t tell where the light was coming from. He was just there, completely enveloped in blue. He was on his back with his head turned slightly toward her. Teyla threw her hands out as she skidded to a stop in front of him and banged her fists against the gel.

“John!” she screamed, the sound erupting from deep within her gut. John’s chest was bare, just like it had been in the jumper, but his belt, boots and socks had been removed like the rest of them, and his pants clung to his thin frame. She could just make out the dark bruises on his chest.

His arms were at his sides and he almost looked like he was sleeping, except that his mouth was slightly ajar and he was utterly still. The blue color of the gel skewed Teyla’s perceptions, making him look less pale than she knew he was.

“Why is he in there?” Rodney asked, his voice breaking. He was breathing fast, and he pressed his face against the panel.

“Get him out!” Ronon roared. Teyla flinched as the Satedan slammed into the panel on her other side. The gel gave about an inch then flung him back. Undeterred, he began clawing at the material, and Teyla felt a flash of hope as chunks of the gel began to fall at his feet.

Ronon yelled again, digging faster, and Teyla jumped forward in time to see the small hole he’d started suddenly fill. Ronon stepped back, staring incredulously at the smooth panel face. He glanced at his feet as if to assure himself he really had torn some of the gel away, then attacked the wall again.

Teyla could only watch, mesmerized. The harder Ronon tried to break through, the faster the panel repaired itself. Within minutes, there was a small pile of gel bits at his feet. She bent down to pick one up, squishing it between her fingers. Suddenly, it liquefied and dripped out of her hands onto the floor.

“Look!” she cried out. The rest of the pieces had also melted down into puddles, and a second later, they seeped into the floor and disappeared completely.

When she glanced back up, the panel had grown opaque and John had disappeared from sight.

“Sheppard!” Ronon’s roar echoed painfully in the empty room

She moved toward him, thinking she should comfort him or calm him down but not really sure exactly how to accomplish that, but then Rodney spun around and backed up, pressing himself against the panel and staring up toward the ceiling.

“What’s that?” He raised a shaking hand to point at another smaller panel above the door.

Teyla twisted toward it and tensed. This section was no more than a foot high and about two feet wide, and its center was beginning to bulge outward. The crackling light had reappeared, and it looked like it was pushing into the room. Teyla half expected a wet slurp as the light finally popped out of the panel encased in a bubble of the gel. The perfectly round sphere appeared silently and hovered above them.

“Humans.”

The sound came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Teyla couldn’t tell if she’d actually heard the voice or if the sound was simply in her head, but the others jerked in response next to her.

“Um, hello?” Rodney said, still pressing himself against the back wall and sliding behind Teyla and Ronon.

“Hello. Common greeting. Humans.”

The voice was mechanical and stilted, like a computer reading a string of syllables. The bead of light within it flashed brighter as it spoke, and Teyla shivered at the eerie sensation of having watched a computer come to life before her eyes.

“What are you?” she asked.

The sphere bobbed and swung toward her, and she stepped back.

“Solus. Emendo.”

“What?” Ronon asked.

“We are. Solus Emendo.”

Rodney leaned forward a little, his curiosity overcoming some of his fear. “We? How many of there are you?”

“We are. One.” The light within the sphere flashed when it uttered the word _one,_ then drew back again. Bolts of electricity radiated from the center bead toward the outer shell, a storm of power inside a globe not much larger than her head.

“What do you want with us?” she asked, and she was pleased that she sounded so calm. Calm yet forceful. That had been the effect she’d been going for despite the fear and grief raging beneath the surface. Like the sphere in front of them, only her storm was not as visible.

“Where’s our ship?” Ronon added with a growl.

“Not ship,” the sphere flashed at them. “Not living.”

“What?” Rodney asked. He had detached himself from the back wall but he stayed behind his teammates. Teyla felt him move closer to her.

“We are. Living.”

“Who’s we?” Ronon curled his hands into fists as he bit out the words.

“I think it’s the ship,” Rodney whispered.

Teyla glanced back at him. “This ship is alive?”

“We are. One,” the sphere answered. It slid another foot closer. “Once we were. Many. Long ago.”

“What do you want with us?” Teyla asked, turning her full attention back to the hovering globe.

“To fulfill. Purpose.”

“What purpose?” Ronon snapped, his frustration growing ever closer to the surface.

“Explore. Observe. Gather information.”

“What information?” the Satedan shouted, stepping forward.

The sphere swerved away from him, then slowly approached again. “Growth. Energy. Must grow.”

They stared at it, waiting for it to continue but it seemed to think its explanation was adequate. It stared back, and Teyla felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. It looked almost like an eye, its bead of energy at the center the pupil. Or perhaps this was just an interface, and the real alien was somewhere else.

Except that it had said it and the ship were one. The entire ship was the alien. She grit her teeth as she realized what that meant. The alien—the ship—had been watching them the entire time. It had seen her and her teammates wandering the halls. It had guided her first to Ronon, then to John. Had Rodney not been so vocal, she had no doubt it would have eventually guided them to him.

And if it was alive, then perhaps it could be reasoned with. She stepped forward, holding her hands outstretched in front of her, palms facing upward. “Please, let us go home. Our friend…” She stopped swallowing against the lump of emotion in her throat. She half turned toward the panel where they’d seen John and waved at it. “We need to bring our friend home.”

“Mistake,” the orb responded, the bead of light filling the round space for a brief second.

“What was a mistake?” Teyla frowned, not quite following.

“Observing humans. Fighting. Too much energy. Surge. Caused mistake.”

The sphere threw out the words in a steady stream with no inflection or emphasis, and it took a second for Teyla to wrap her head around the information it had just given.

Rodney was faster. She heard him sputter behind her. “Surge? Did…did you see us on the planet? Were you there?”

“Observing. Mistake.”

Teyla’s breath caught in her throat and she raised a hand to her chest.

“Mistake,” the globe repeated. “One human. Energy gone.”

“Sheppard,” Ronon growled.

“Much regret.”

“You killed him?” Rodney cried.

“Mistake. Much regret,” the sphere responded.

“Then fix it,” Ronon hissed, his voice low and dangerous. Teyla could see his entire body shaking. “Bring. Him. _Back._ ”

“Very difficult. Too much energy. Required. Very difficult.”

Ronon lunged forward, catching the sphere in the palm of his hand. Teyla had sensed what he was about to do just a split second before he’d moved, but she could not bring herself to stop him or intervene.

“Fix him!” he roared. The light within the sphere was flashing frantically. When it said nothing, Ronon screamed again and slammed it into the wall. Teyla felt a deep surge of satisfaction as the sphere exploded and the electric bead winked out.

“Ronon, are you injured?”

Ronon glanced at her, then down at his hand, and shook his head. He held up his undamaged palm to show her. He was breathing hard, his eyes wild and still enraged.

“Wait,” Rodney breathed.

“What?” Ronon snapped, turning his attention toward Rodney.

Rodney flinched and stepped back, but he pointed to the crumbles of gel on the floor. “It said _very difficult._ ”

“So?”

“When you told it to fix its mistake and bring John back, it said ‘Very difficult,’ not ‘Impossible.’ _Very difficult, too much energy._ ”

Teyla felt her heart lift. Was Rodney saying… “It can bring John back?”

“Not anymore! Conan there just splattered it against the wall!”

The words slapped across her face, and she stepped back at the stinging force. Ronon was staring at Rodney, the horror of his mistake etched into his face. She snapped her head toward the remains of the sphere and saw them liquefy like the pieces Ronon had dug out of the panel. A moment later, they disappeared.

Ronon turned away from them and walked to the back panel. He reached a hand out to the panel and lowered his head, and Teyla felt a knife stab through her, the pain sharp enough that she felt suddenly nauseous and lightheaded. Rodney was glaring at both of them.

“It said it did not have enough energy,” she spoke up, wanting to defend Ronon’s gut reaction. She had wanted to do the same thing to the sphere.

“Genius, remember? Energy is what I do,” Rodney bit back. “I could have a PhD in energy if I wanted. Too much energy, too little energy—I am the go-to person in this entire galaxy when it comes to energy. Am I wrong?”

Teyla shook her head. Her feet were rooted to the ground. Had they just lost their chance to get John back? The sphere had not said impossible, but that didn’t mean it was possible. Despite Rodney’s claims, he couldn’t create energy whenever he wanted. The idea that anything—whether it was energy or an alien—could bring a dead man back to life…she shook her head. She had seen many wonders in her life, but never that. Never that.

“We should attempt to find the jumper again,” she said, surprised again at how calm she sounded. She certainly did not feel it. “Atlantis will—”

Her voice cut off as the light reappeared in the gel square above the door, and hope burst in her chest. Ronon had not destroyed it. It popped into existence again, as silent as before. This time, however, it stayed close to the ceiling, well out of their reach.

“Follow.”

Ronon spun around, and Teyla could almost feel the relief emanating from him. He and Rodney stepped forward automatically. The door slid open and the bubble ducked under the head of the frame and out into the hallway. Teyla hesitated, reaching for the back panel.

“I will stay,” she said.

Her two teammates spun around and their eyes shifted from her to the space where they’d last seen John.

“I’m not sure we should split up,” Rodney said.

“We don’t know what it wants,” Teyla responded. “Or where it wants to take us.”

“If it was going to hurt us, don’t you think it would have by now?”

Ronon glanced at Rodney and shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Follow,” the sphere called out. The sound seemed farther away, making Teyla think it was coming from somewhere specific versus everywhere, like she had first assumed. Maybe the panels in the walls.

Rodney turned toward the sphere. “You said before you could fix your mistake, that you could bring John back?”

“Very difficult,” it flashed. “Too much energy.”

“Difficult but not impossible?” Teyla asked.

“Great energy. Requirement. Too much.” The sphere swung side-to-side as if to shake its head.

Rodney cleared his throat and stepped forward, straightening out his t-shirt. “Well, you see, I’m a bit of an expert in that area…uh, energy, that is. If you let me look at your power systems, I might be able to help.”

“Increase energy?”

“Yes.”

“Very difficult. Need new energy.”

“New energy? I could…um…I still might be able do that. How much energy are we talking about?”

“Careful, McKay,” Ronon whispered.

“Follow.” The sphere had moved forward as Rodney had talked, but now it backed up again into the hallway and disappeared from Teyla’s sight.

“Please. Please let me look at your energy levels or whatever,” Rodney said, following it. Ronon went with him, but stood in the doorframe, one foot in the hall and one foot in the room. McKay stared up at a spot a little farther down the hall where Teyla assumed the orb had floated to, his eyes pleading. “If I can produce enough power to help John…”

“Understand,” it answered, sounding still farther away. “Increase power. Produce more energy. Method is difficult.”

“But not impossible?” Rodney asked.

“Possible. Requires additional. Help.”

“I can help. Let me help.”

“Rodney…” Teyla called out.

He was standing in the hallway, framed in the door. He glanced at Teyla then back to the sphere. “No, just…let me at least look at it.”

“Help. Follow,” the stilted computer voice insisted. “Find more. Energy.”

“What about Sheppard?” Ronon called out.

“All follow. We must. Go.”

Rodney looked at both of them and waved them forward. Ronon shrugged and stepped into the hall, but he waited for Teyla. With one last glance at the opaque surface of John’s panel, she followed them.

As soon as all three of them were in the hallway, the bubble plowed into the nearest rectangle of gel and disappeared. The light remained, though, once more appearing to be a large, spinning ball of electricity.

“Follow.” The voice said again. The sound echoed in the hall around them.

The light jumped into the next panel, leaving a line of fading white behind it. They followed it like they had followed it since they’d arrived, but Teyla took careful note of where they were going and how many turns they made. She saw Ronon doing the same. Wherever the alien light wanted to take them, she was confident she would be able to find her way back to John.

The light stopped in front of another set of doors. Rodney jumped toward them before she or Ronon could urge caution and stepped into the new room. Ronon darted in after him and grabbed his arm, jerking him back and taking in the room in a single glance. Teyla followed more slowly.

The room was much larger than any of the others. As they walked in, Teyla saw a collection of sofas, coffee tables and fake potted trees and plants deeper into the room, but the area directly in front of the door was empty and dominated by two wide gel panels against the back wall at least as long, right to left, as Ronon was tall. The lounge area had enough seats to accommodate a large number of people, which struck her as odd given the lack of people, human or alien. The entire ship seemed to have been built for a significant crew. How many had the place once contained? Were they now all part of the single entity of the ship?

Whatever other questions she had fled her mind as the right-hand panel lit up, revealing John’s body. She ran forward, pressing against the gel. It was just like in the other room. He was in the exact same position, the exact same depth within the gel. Was it really even him?

“How do we know that’s Sheppard?” Ronon asked, voicing Teyla’s thoughts.

She snapped her head around and saw the blue sphere had reappeared. Rodney and Ronon had wandered closer to John, but Ronon was facing the sphere now. The orb zoomed away from him, then dipped and headed straight toward Teyla’s head.

She ducked, throwing her arms up above her in protection. The sphere sped past her and slammed into the panel. Teyla spun around to see the ball of energy fade into the gel, but almost as soon as it winked out, the entire panel slid out of the wall, supported by a thick metal slab beneath it. John’s body was still suspended in the center, but even as she watched, he began to sink. When he hit the slab at the bottom, the gel shimmered and softened, then slowly pulled back into the wall.

Teyla moved first, reaching a tentative hand out. She frowned, dismayed at how it trembled. She was still sore from her and Ronon’s efforts on the planet, but the pain was all but forgotten now that John was lying in front of them. She went for John’s hand first and grabbed his fingers.

They were ice cold and she clenched her jaw at the sob trying to burst out. He was dry, even though the gel had looked wet. She stretched her other hand out and brushed her fingers against his cheek. The warmth in his skin almost undid all of her control and her eyes welled up with tears. She blinked rapidly, reining in the overwhelming emotions. Letting go of his hand, she fingered the bruises on his chest.

He was still warm—not as warm as he had been, but not the cold stiffness she’d expected. The skin stretching over his bruised chest was warmest of all. Ronon walked around her to his head and laid his hands on each side of John’s face, bowing his head, and Rodney stepped up next to her and brushed his shoulder against hers.

He reached a hand out then jerked it back. Teyla could hear his breathing had grown ragged but she didn’t dare look up at his face. His expressions were always so open, and she wasn’t sure she was prepared to see the pain and grief she knew must be streaming through him. When he reached out again, Teyla grabbed his quivering hand and guided it toward John’s arm.

Rodney stiffened, but he let her set it on John’s forearm. He exhaled loudly, leaning against her a little more as he tightened his grip on John. He leaned forward, stretching out his other hand and resting it on John’s leg. She could see him shaking, but he was quiet—quieter than she had ever seen him, except perhaps when Carson had died.

The blue sphere gave them their moment with John. After several minutes, Rodney finally straightened and released his hold. He turned back to the alien light.

“You can really bring him back?” he whispered.

The sphere jumped up and down in the air, its flashing center echoing its excitement. “With much energy. Still possible. Must move. Quickly.”

“Do you have a computer? Or my computer? If I can get back onto the jumper…our ship…”

“No.”

Ronon hadn’t moved at John’s head, but he jerked up in surprise at the sphere’s response. “No?”

The sphere jerked backward, edging closer to Rodney and farther from the Satedan. Ronon stepped forward, raising a fist.

“Ronon, stop. Wait!” Rodney cried out. He turned back to the floating bubble. “I want to help with your energy requirements but I can only do that if—”

“No. We do not have. Required energy. Need new. Energy.”

“Maybe I can—”

“Need new energy.”

“Okay,” Rodney snapped. “New energy—got it. If you let us return home, I can bring back a generator, something to produce more energy—”

“Wrong energy. Life needs. Life-energy.”

Teyla’s head snapped between the two of them as she tried to follow the conversation. The stilted cadence of the computerized voice was mind-boggling. Life-energy? She had never heard of such a thing.

“What is life-energy?” she asked. She grabbed John’s arm and held onto it, wondering if the ship would take John back into the wall. She would not let that happen—she would not lose him again.

“You. Humans. Life-energy.”

“Me?” Rodney repeated. He glanced over at Ronon and Teyla, then back to the sphere. “You need us to give Sheppard his life back?”

Teyla shook her head immediately. “John would not want that. We cannot exchange our lives for his no matter how much we want him back.”

“Incorrect,” the alien globe answered. “Life-energy. Not life.”

“Can you be a little more specific and a little less cryptic? Uh, please.”

Teyla could hear her own frustration in Rodney’s voice and she nodded her support.

“Life-energy from three. Restore life. Of one.”

The answer made little sense to Teyla. Before any of them could ask for further clarification, a metal slab slid out of the wall behind Ronon and lined up directly beneath the second long gel panel. Ronon slid out from between the two to stand next to Teyla, and Rodney pressed against her back to look at it. A light began to pulse between the two panels, bouncing back and forth like a child’s ball.

“One offers. Life-energy. Transmit to one. Without life.”

“How do we do that?” Ronon rumbled.

“Demonstration.”

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

“What kind of demonstration?” Ronon asked. The bobbing sphere was pissing him off with its cryptic phrases. Sheppard was dead, and this thing was bouncing around like McKay on double-chocolate brownie day.

“Lie down,” the ball answered.

Ronon glanced over at Sheppard stretched out on his slab and then at the bare slab next to him. Was that what the alien wanted? He looked up at it as it zoomed over his head and halted over the head of the second slab.

“No,” he growled.

“No pain,” it answered back. “We take nothing. Demonstration only.”

The ball waited, expecting them to follow it the way they had so far. Ronon bit his lip, looking again at Sheppard. The man’s body was gray, the color washed out of it. Every time he looked at it, he was struck by the contradictory information it shot back at him. It looked exactly like his friend and nothing like him. The hair, the ears, the hands…they were all Sheppard.

But it wasn’t _him._ Sheppard had exuded strength and loyalty and humor and dedication and…and everything. He was always moving, always thinking. Ronon had enjoyed ribbing him, running faster than he knew Sheppard could keep up, pushing him beyond his limits in their almost daily sparring fights, but time and again, Sheppard surprised him with his tenacity.

John Sheppard had never given up.

 _Until today._

The thought came out of nowhere, flashing through his mind. _No,_ he thought, and he clenched his teeth against the flash of anger that coursed through him. He couldn’t lay this on Sheppard, and the fact that the thought had occurred to him for even a second pissed him off. He squeezed his hands into tight fists and forced himself to take a deep calming breath.

The ball flashed again, darting toward him then away again like a skittish animal. “Demonstration only. Safe.”

Ronon walked over to the slab and ran his finger along its cold surface. Teyla and Rodney had been standing near Sheppard, watching him, but Teyla stepped toward him now.

“Ronon, you do not have to do this,” she said. She was still holding onto Sheppard’s arm and he grimaced at the way his hand flopped when she moved. He was still warm, but in a few more hours he’d begin to stiffen.

He closed his eyes, casting the image of Sheppard’s corpse from his mind, and jumped onto the slab. He took another deep breath and looked at Teyla. “Shoot it if it does anything to me.”

“With what?” McKay squawked. “And how is that going to help anything?”

Ronon turned away from them. He’d forgotten for a second that they’d all been disarmed. What he wouldn’t give for three seconds with his blaster. The ball swung around to face him, almost close enough for him to touch it, but he knew it would slide away if he even looked like he was going to grab it. It waited, its center light pulsing at a constant tempo.

He swung his legs up and laid down. “I’m ready.”

He felt more than saw the gel from the panel next to him begin to ooze around him. It filled the slab but didn’t spill over the edge, and the level began to rise. It was weird—not wet exactly, but not dry. And it was warm. The level rose two inches, then three, then four, then pooled over the nape of his neck. It covered his legs and stomach and crept past his ears, blocking the slight sounds of his team moving around and the background hum of the ship and plunging the room into a deep, muted silence.

He shifted his eyes as Teyla and McKay appeared next to him. He could see their mouths moving and could almost read their frantic questions in the movement of their lips, but he heard nothing. The gel was creeping over his chest and he had the sudden panicked though that it was going to cover him completely.

He jerked, or tried to. His body was completely immobilized, his arms and legs pinned to the table. The gel reached his temples and he closed his eyes, waiting for it to envelop him—

And then he was standing in a classroom, surrounded by rows of small desks. A woman stood at the front, her blond hair pulled into a bun and a smile splitting her face. She was talking, but Ronon could not hear anything. He walked toward the woman with sudden recognition. His teacher—she’d been his teacher when he’d been a boy. A very young boy. He glanced at walls filled with drawings and posters. If someone had asked him about this room, he could never have described it—not like this—and yet it was perfect. He smiled at its familiarity as he remembered the different projects and field trips this class had taken him on.

And the teacher. He’d been in love with her—as much as a seven-year-old could be. It was the year he’d had perfect attendance, much to his parents’ delight. He stood in the front corner of the room and surveyed the rows of students, picking out faces that should have been long forgotten but weren’t. He saw his best friend, his first girlfriend—who wouldn’t give him the time of day for another two years—the boy who’d bullied him endlessly his first year of school until Ronon had eventually decked him.

A boy in the center of the third row stood up, his eyes sparkling in anticipation and excitement, and it took a second for Ronon to place him and recognize he was staring at himself. Seven-year-old Ronon tugged on his brown school vest, straightening it out, his grin growing wider at whatever the teacher was saying. A moment later, he slipped out from behind his desk and walked to the front of the room, the short curly dreads sticking out in all directions and bouncing as he moved.

With sudden clarity, Ronon remembered this moment, and he snapped his head to the back of the room. His breath caught in his throat. There, standing tall and proud, were his parents. They looked younger than he remembered, but they were smiling. His father held a hat in hands covered in dark soot and oil—he’d come straight to the school from work. His mother was ringing her hands together, a movement he knew stemmed from barely contained excitement.

They were young and happy, pride brimming in their eyes at their youngest child. Ronon turned back to the teacher, who now had a hand around his younger self’s shoulders. In her other hand, a shiny medallion swung from its ribbon. The class began to applaud, and some of the students banged their palms against their desks. Ronon would be let home early from school that day, and his mother would swing him in circles around the kitchen in celebration, the small medallion flapping against his chest.

He gasped, and the ceiling of the ship blinked into focus. He lay still for a moment, reaching for the memory again. It had been so strong and so detailed. More detailed than any memory he could recall, even his recent ones. The gel pulled away from his skin, and he shivered at the slight drop in temperature.

“Ronon, are you okay?” Teyla asked, grabbing his hand and leaning over him.

“What?” he blinked. He shook his head, dragging his attention back into the present.

“What happened?” McKay asked.

Ronon pushed himself up and swung his legs over the edge, grateful for Teyla’s steadying hand on his arm. He stayed sitting, not quite trusting his legs to hold him yet. “I…it was a memory, but clear, like I was actually there.”

“A memory of what?” Teyla asked.

“I was young—seven. I’d gotten the highest marks on the government standard—a test—and the teacher was giving me an award in front of the entire class.”

“You got the highest grade? What kind of test was it?” McKay asked.

Ronon barely noticed the glare Teyla shot at him or McKay’s mumbled apology. He grabbed a hold of the image of his mother and father. Young and happy—their whole lives still in front of them.

But his father would die slowly a year before the Wraith destroyed Sateda, and his mother…

He sucked in a ragged gasp. The joy of seeing his parents alive gave way to the pain of knowing what would happen to them. To his entire family. To his entire world.

“Ronon?” Teyla tightened her grip on his arm but Ronon ignored her, shaking off the memories.

He scanned the room, finding the ball of light. “What does that have to do with Sheppard and your life-energy?”

“Memories of childhood. Precious to you. Life-energy in them. Strong.”

“What are you saying?” Ronon asked, feeling renewed frustration at the alien’s obscure speech. “You want my memories of Sateda?”

He slid off the slab, relieved that his legs held. He stepped toward the shimmering ball and glowered when it swung backward, away from him.

“Of childhood. This energy. In you, powerful.”

Ronon glanced at Sheppard, seeing only gray skin, then back at the alien. “How does this help Sheppard?”

“Life is past. Present. Future.”

Ronon swallowed at the growing realization of what the alien was asking of him. “And you want my past?”

“To give the one. Without energy.”

He heard McKay and Teyla react behind him as they too picked up on what the alien was saying, but he ignored them, keeping his attention focused on the glowing sphere. “And what happens to me afterward?”

“Ronon, that is…that is too much,” Teyla breathed out behind him.

“What happens to me afterward?” he asked again, louder.

“You remain. Same. Only as you were. That is taken.”

He would be the same, but without his memories of growing up? _Could_ he be the same without those memories? Without his family and his school mates and…and Sateda?

“I’m not saying I can even begin to understand how this works,” McKay piped up, talking to the alien but shooting pointed looks at Ronon. “But before you start ripping memories from us, we’re going to need you to give us some kind of assurance that you can actually do what you’re saying you can do here.”

“Rodney is correct,” Teyla added.

Ronon nodded, relieved to have a few more seconds to consider what the alien was asking of him.

The sphere bobbed. “Demonstration.”

Ronon turned to see gel flowing around Sheppard’s body the same way it had done to him. It flowed from the bottom of the panel in an endless supply. As one, he, McKay and Teyla rushed to the slab to stare down at their team leader and friend. Ronon felt his heart begin to pound in his chest. He’d tried not to get his hopes up, and had managed to keep a clamp on them until he’d relived that memory. But now…the memory had been so perfect in all of its details, and what had seemed laughingly impossible was not anymore, including the possibility that they could get Sheppard back.

The gel covered Sheppard’s legs and arms and crept up the sides of his ribs and head, but it stopped at a much lower level than Ronon had felt. They waited, and Ronon held his breath as a thousand beads within the gel began to pulse.

All three of them started when Sheppard’s eyes suddenly flew open. Ronon watched the sightless pupils dilate in reaction to the light in the room and reached a hand out toward him. Sheppard, still encased in gel just below his ears, suddenly threw his head back, gasping, and Ronon jerked away instinctively. He felt his heart beating in his chest at what he was witnessing. Sheppard’s chest rose as he took in a deep breath and his body relaxed on the slab.

“John?” Teyla called out. She dug her hand into gel that looked more like thick blue water than anything solid and grabbed his hand.

Sheppard continued to stare up at the ceiling, giving no indication that he had noticed them or could even hear them. The gel was well below his ears, and Ronon clamped his mouth shut in apprehension. Sheppard breathed again, his ribs slowly expanding. Teyla bent closer to him, reaching for the pulse point in his neck.

Sheppard breathed a third time, but as he expelled, his eyes slid closed. They waited for his chest to rise, but he was deathly still once more. Teyla pressed her fingers against his neck, then bent her head over his mouth. She straightened a moment later and shook her head, but Ronon had already known what she’d find. It was blatantly obvious just by looking at him.

The alien dropped into Ronon’s line of vision. “Energy required. Too much. Cannot sustain.”

Ronon walked to the bare slab and hopped up. He’d expected the decision to be more difficult, but in the end, the answer had come easily to him. He stretched out, folding his arms over his stomach.

“Ronon, you will lose most if not all of your memories of Sateda,” Teyla said.

He glanced at her, then at McKay as the scientist walked up to his side.

“There’s got to be some other way,” McKay said.

Ronon shook his head, bringing up the image of his parents standing in the back of his classroom. The knowledge of what would happen to them was fused to his past, the happy memories inseparably connected with the pain that still haunted him, still cut and burned at the most unexpected moments.

He would lose Sateda, but maybe he would lose the pain too. He steeled himself and met Teyla’s eyes. “I can hold onto memories or I can help Sheppard now.”

“Life-energy. No other way,” the alien added.

Teyla and McKay jerked their hands away as the gel surrounded him again. It was easier the second time, and Ronon closed his eyes. The gel rose quickly, submerging him completely, but before he had time to panic at what was sure to be suffocation, a lightning bolt of electricity flashed through his body. Snapshots of Sateda, his family, his school, his home—everywhere he had ever been and everyone he had ever seen—flipped through this mind, spinning faster and faster until they blurred together with dizzying speed.

And then nothing.

* * *

 **Part Three**

Rodney stared, mesmerized, at the light pulsing back and forth across the two panels. The light had been no bigger than a marble at first, trudging slowly through the blue, but as time passed, it had grown bigger and sunk deeper into the wall.

The panels covered the ship, lining every hallway and every room. Was the gel all interconnected, running through the entire ship? He reached a hand out and pressed his fingers into the stuff encasing John. It was solid, but a little squishy, like rubber.

 _Like those shoe inserts,_ he thought. He snapped his mouth shut at the sudden urge to giggle and focused again on the light. It was as big as a soccer ball now, and moving so fast between the two panels, his neck was starting to get tired at the movement. He closed his eyes and bowed his head.

By unspoken agreement, he and Teyla had split up. He had stayed near John while she’d moved to Ronon’s side. The gel had oozed out of the panel and submerged both of his teammates. He opened his eyes to look through the tinted blue substance at John. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry or scream or just curl up into a ball in some dark corner of a room until he woke up from this nightmare. His mind jumped, latching onto each moment until it crumbled in his grasp and he was left flailing.

John had breathed for a few seconds—had given them all the appearance of being alive again—but looking at him now…He was as dead as ever. Rodney had never expected he’d end up in a career that exposed him to dead bodies. Not that he’d seen a lot of corpses, but enough that he didn’t lose his stomach at first sight anymore.

And John wasn’t even that bad. His friend wasn’t visibly injured, if you ignored the bruises on his chest from Teyla and Ronon’s CPR. No bleeding wounds or gaping holes. He’d seen those bodies before; they were almost unrecognizable. John was just John. Sleeping.

The urge to laugh was back and he shook his head. How could anyone mistake sleeping for death? They looked nothing alike. It was a cliché of movies and books. John looked nothing like he was sleeping. He looked like more like a statue—colorless and frozen.

Oh, God. He was dead. Rodney shivered, feeling his stomach churn with nausea. How could John be dead? They took a lot of risks going out on missions—the Wraith, the Genii, the Asurans, disgruntled whoevers. He pinched the bridge of his nose and forced himself to breathe slowly. Was this even real? Because it sure as hell felt real.

He set a hand out on the block of gel encasing John, but a moment later he snatched it back. The gel was warm under his hand, almost hot. He glanced at Teyla to see if she was experiencing the same thing and his eyes settled on Ronon’s form.

The nausea slammed into him again. What had they done? Why had they let Ronon do this? John had seemed to breathe, but what if that had just been an illusion? And now Ronon was…he swallowed and pressed a hand to his roiling stomach. Ronon had laid down on the table quickly—too quickly for Rodney to think through what his teammate was about to do, to work through the consequences of each option, to play out their moves against the alien ship’s three or four turns ahead.

The gel had surrounded Ronon quickly and covered him. He’d fallen unconscious almost instantly but his body had tensed automatically as the gel had flowed into his mouth and nostrils. Was he dead? He looked as dead as John—just as still and just as pale. The alien gel was…he had no idea what the gel was, or this life-energy the alien was so keen on. All he knew was that Ronon hadn’t taken a single breath in over an hour.

And John—they’d lost him hours earlier. An hour and a half on the planet, then who knew how many hours while they’d all lain unconscious in the alien ship. More hours had passed until Ronon and Teyla had found him and they’d wandered around the ship looking for John, then stood here debating with the floating blob about what to do next.

What this alien was promising them…it wasn’t possible, no matter what Ronon claimed he saw. They’d been knocked out in the woods for at least a couple of minutes before any of them came to, and then they’d found John not breathing. All it took was a few minutes for brain death to begin. Even if this alien could restart John’s body, his mind would be gone, damaged beyond all hope. The only thing even remotely analogous to this, and the similarities were very remote, was when they’d injected Elizabeth with—

“Nanites!” he yelled, stumbling backward and lifting his hands in the air. Teyla spun around and began back-pedaling away from Ronon.

“Nanites?”

“What else could make John’s body look like it was alive? It’s not like John talked to us or said anything. It would have to be in the gel too, which means we’ve all been infected—you, me, Ronon, John. They could be everywhere. They could…this might not even be real! This could all be some sick illusion that…that…”

He was on the ground, his chest heaving. He couldn’t breathe. As hard as his lungs were working, they couldn’t pull in any oxygen. He was going to die. He was going to—

“Rodney!”

Teyla pulled him up by his shoulders and shook him. He could feel his stomach flipping around and black spots were dancing across his vision. Hyperventilating—he was hyperventilating. He slapped a hand against his mouth as Teyla’s face swam into focus. She was yelling something at him, but he couldn’t hear her over the roaring in his ears. He pressed his thumb against the side of one of his nostrils and forced himself to breathe only through the other one.

He would have preferred a paper bag, but he’d stopped carrying one of those around every where he went a while ago. It had been years, actually, since he’d last had a panic attack this bad. As his breathing slowed down, he realized he was lying on the ground, Teyla’s hands warm on his arms.

“Breathe slowly. In. Out. In. Out.” Her voice finally pierced the fog. He forced himself to match her slow breathing rhythm and, gradually, his muscles relaxed. The disorienting sensation of breathing too fast and not enough loosened its hold on him.

“Are you alright?” Teyla asked a minute later.

Rodney nodded and pushed himself up until he was sitting. His arms felt shaky, and his stomach was trying to curl into itself, but he wasn’t dying. He blushed, a little appalled that he’d freaked himself into hyperventilating. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“It was a perfectly normal reaction,” Teyla soothed, patting his shoulder.

Except that she hadn’t freaked out. She wasn’t the one sitting on the floor forgetting how to breathe. He smiled, grateful at least for her attempt to comfort him.

“Do you really think it could be nanites?”

He opened his mouth to say yes, then shrugged. “Honestly, I have no idea what to think. We have no information, no scanners or computers. No way to independently assess and identify what we’re dealing with here.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t really matter what’s going on; we have no way of figuring it out.”

“Was Ronon too rash in his decision?”

“Yes,” Rodney answered, then faltered. “Maybe. I…I don’t know.” He sighed, forcing himself to work through their situation logically. “Even if he’d waited, we still wouldn’t have any more information than we have now. I mean, maybe this alien blob thing would have given us our scanners, but maybe it is nanites. Maybe we’ve been captured by the Asurans—if that’s the case, then we could sit here for decades and never know any more than we do now.”

And they hadn’t tested the alien, either. Now that Rodney thought about it, they seemed to be doing exactly what it wanted. But hadn’t they demanded it help John? They’d begged the thing to bring John back, and once they’d started down that path, they hadn’t questioned anything else. And now Ronon was—

Teyla jumped to her feet and ran back toward Ronon, making Rodney wondered if he’d been rambling out loud the entire time, but then he saw what had caused her reaction. The block of gel was melting away from both men. He scrambled to his feet and positioned himself halfway between Ronon and John so he could watch over each one.

A thin layer of gel no more than two inches high remained around John, but Ronon’s gel pulled back into the wall panel completely, and seriously, he needed to get a sample of this stuff to take back to Atlantis. Almost as soon as the gel fully retracted, Ronon sucked in a deep, desperate gasp and Rodney released the breath he’d been unconsciously holding.

“Ronon?” Teyla called out. Rodney stepped toward them, but he froze and glanced back at John, suddenly unsure of where to go. He needed to know Ronon was okay, but if John woke up and no one was there…He took a tentative step toward John, keeping Ronon in sight.

“Ronon,” Teyla said again, brushing his hair away from his face. “Are you alright?”

“Uh…hey…”

His voice was low and rough, but Rodney could see him moving his head as he looked around. He turned his attention to John and grimaced at his friend’s washed-out complexion. The level of gel was well below John’s carotid artery and Rodney pressed his fingers against it in search of a pulse.

Nothing. Not that he had really expected it, and yet… He held his hand against John’s cheek, then slid it up to his forehead. The skin was warm, much warmer than it had been. He flashed to the gel that had encased his friend, and the heat within it that he’d felt under his palm. He moved his hand down to John’s chest and stomach.

Warm. Normal warm. Life warm.

A groan directed Rodney’s attention to his other two teammates. Ronon was sitting up slowly with Teyla’s help and looking very queasy. Once he was fully upright, he moaned again and began to list to the side with his eyes closed. Teyla tightened her grip, wrapping her arm around him.

“Ronon, what’s wrong?

“Dizzy,” he breathed out. He scrunched forward and let his head hang, and for a second Rodney thought he’d passed out, but then he suddenly straightened, shaking his head. It reminded Rodney way too much of a bear waking up from a long nap and he almost called out to Teyla to warn her.

Instead of growling or biting, however, Ronon swung his legs off the table and slid to the ground. Teyla wrapped her arms around his torso as he hit the ground and began to flail, his legs folding underneath him. By some miracle, she managed to keep the much larger man upright long enough for him to grab onto the edge of the slab and get his feet under him again. Ronon breathed heavily and his face grew paler.

He lurched toward the sofas on the far side of the room, and Teyla walked with him, peppering him with questions. Rodney stayed where he was, telling himself he needed to stay with John and silently begging Ronon not to throw up. Just the possibility of it was making his stomach flip in sympathy.

By the time Ronon and Teyla reached the closest sofa, Rodney could see Ronon shaking visibly. Teyla kept a firm hold on his arm as Ronon sank to the cushions in relief.

“Ronon, what are you feeling? Are you alright?”

“Um…don’t know,” he answered. “Tired. Headache.” He leaned to the side and pulled his feet up onto the couch. “Just need…lie down for a minute.”

Teyla guided him down, not that she could have kept him upright for much longer. “Do you remember what happened?”

She was squatting in front of him now, so Rodney couldn’t see his face, but he heard his soft answer. “Just need to lie down.”

Teyla sighed, patting his shoulder. “Rest, Ronon. We will watch over you.”

Ronon’s body relaxed perceptibly into the sofa, and Teyla straightened just enough to sit next to him. She glanced up at Rodney and nodded, looking worried and relieved all at the same time. Ronon was alive, obviously, but clearly disoriented.

He’d left his hand on John’s chest, and he spun around now at a sudden movement beneath his palm. He saw ribs and skin and bruises…and then his hand moved again, rising gradually then dropping just as slowly. A few seconds later, John breathed again.

“Sheppard!” Rodney cried out. He held a hand over John’s mouth and grinned wildly at the sensation of expelled air blowing against his fingers. He twisted around to Teyla, who was already running toward him. “Teyla!”

“What is happening?”

“He’s breathing!”

Teyla crowded in next to him and reached her own hand out to rest on John’s moving— _breathing_ —chest. “He is warm!”

“Yeah,” Rodney breathed out. All of his previous reasoning flew out the window. John was breathing. “He’s still pale, but maybe not as much.”

It was a stretch at best; John looked about the same. Teyla moved her hand to John’s neck, digging her fingers into the skin and muscle.

The waiting was killing him. Ignoring the oozing slimy feel of the gel, Rodney dug his hands into it until he had a hold of John’s wrist. He lifted the other man’s arm out of the gel and was surprised when his fingers came away dry. He really needed to get a sample of this stuff.

He fumbled at the wrist, searching for a pulse. He could never find a pulse on wrists, not even his own, but Teyla was still leaning forward, still pushing her fingers into John’s neck. Rodney moved his fingers again, readjusting his grip…

And felt a faint flutter. Teyla reacted at the same time, the only thing making Rodney certain he hadn’t just imagined it. John’s heart beat again, the reverberating flutter through his arteries a little stronger.

“The process. Begins.”

Rodney jerked at the voice behind him and dropped John’s arm back into the ooze. He looked up at the floating sphere.

“John—”

The globe flashed, cutting Rodney off. “Not restored. More energy required.”

“You said you could fix him!” Rodney burst out as he stepped toward the alien orb.

It didn’t move, just rolled in the air as if to look down at him. “With much energy. Very difficult. Need more—”

“You will take more of our memories,” Teyla said. She had moved until she was standing between John’s table and the empty one, absently running her fingers through his hair as she looked between Rodney and the orb.

“Not memories,” the alien sphere answered. “Energy.”

Energy. Always energy. Some of what the alien had said earlier came back to him and Rodney snapped his fingers. “Present! Before, you said you needed a past, present, and future in order to fix John. Is that what you want now? A present? Not that I have any clue what the hell that means.”

“I will go,” Teyla said, stepping away from John and moving toward the sphere.

The alien swerved away from her and dropped until it was almost eye-to-eye with Rodney. “You will give. Present.”

“Me? What…what do I…how do I…”

“Knowledge.”

Rodney’s mind raced. Knowledge? “I thought you wanted energy,” he stammered.

“Energy in. Your knowledge.”

“You want my knowledge about energy? I can do that.” Rodney felt a sudden flush of relief at the idea. “I can help you with your ship; I can fix anything. You need more power, I can—”

“Not power. Energy.” The light within the sphere pulsed brightly, and it spun on its vertical axis, the movement just barely perceptible on its smooth surface.

“Must give. Knowledge. Like other one.”

“Like Ronon?” Rodney squeaked out, filling the air whoosh out of his lungs.

“Gift of present. Like gift. Of past.”

Rodney looked over at Ronon. He was sound asleep, snoring slightly. When he turned back to the sphere, he saw it had moved away from it, giving him a little space. He swallowed. He’d need a little more than that. “What kind of knowledge are we talking about here?”

“Most advanced. Chemistry. Electronics. Mathematics. Computer. Science. Mechanics. Physics. Astronomy. Biology—”

“All of those?” Rodney cut off. “You want me to give everything I know about everything I’ve ever studied?”

Teyla was at his side, grabbing his arm. “Rodney—”

He spun around. “I don’t know if I can do this, Teyla. That’s…that’s everything—that’s who I am. If that thing takes it away from me, I’ll…I’ll be…normal. Maybe not even normal—I’ll be _nothing._ ”

The blue bubble zoomed around so it was back in Rodney’s sight. “Knowledge is. Present.”

“It’s my present,” Rodney snapped. “It’s who I am. It’s the only reason I have the position that I have.”

“Without gift. Process cannot. Complete.”

Rodney stepped away from Teyla and held his hands out to the alien globe. “I’m the smartest man in two galaxies! I’m a genius. Do you really need all of it?”

“Great energy. In you. Connection to knowledge. Powerful.”

Rodney blinked at the words, not sure whether to feel satisfied at or scared of the alien bubble’s assessment. He glanced at Teyla, but she was watching the sphere intently. His mind raced. What could he say? Next to him, John breathed.

“If there’s so much energy there,” he said, grabbing onto the thought that finally surfaced, “what if I just give you some of it. One thing—I can give up one thing. Will there be enough of this life-energy in one thing?”

The sphere hesitated, bouncing slightly in the air. The ball of light within it pulsated in a steady rhythm. Was it on standby? This was the most crucial moment of Rodney’s life and the alien had checked out?

The sphere suddenly stopped moving and inched closer to Rodney’s head. “Much power. In physics.”

Rodney felt his stomach drop out from under him and his legs began to waver. “Physics?” he whispered. Minute trembles shuddered through his body. “Anything but that. Please, anything but physics.”

“Physics. Knowledge of Ancients,” the sphere countered. “Technology. Theory. Very strong. Much energy.”

Rodney stumbled to John’s side. Teyla had moved back to the head of the slab and was brushing her fingers against John’s cheek. John breathed in a steady, rhythmic motion. Now he really did look like he was asleep. His skin had a pinkish tone, scrubbing away the gray.

Rodney plunged his hand back into the gel and grabbed John’s hand. His heart was thrashing in his chest, and he wasn’t sure he could keep himself from hyperventilating again. Physics. It wanted physics. Of all the knowledge it could have asked for… Rodney forced himself to breath slowly.

 _Get a grip,_ he thought. He had a decision to make. The sphere hanging off to the side, just within sight, was waiting for him. Without physics, he would be…he wouldn’t be head of the science department, that’s for sure. He would lose his PhD in physics and his expertise in stargate and wormhole science and Ancient technology. He’d be…he’d be an _engineer._

Radek would take over as head of the science department, and Rodney wouldn’t be anywhere near smart enough to argue with him. Would he even be able to stay on Atlantis? Or on an off-world team? He glanced at Teyla. She was watching him, looking sympathetic, but she said nothing. What could she say? This was his decision. If he was going to make this sacrifice, he had to come to it himself.

John’s hand suddenly tightened on his and he looked down in amazement. Had he imagined that? He lifted his hand slowly and felt John’s grip tighten.

“Teyla,” he breathed out.

John had made no other move, inching no closer toward consciousness, but Rodney wasn’t imagining this. He lifted his hand a little more until it was out of the gel, and John’s hand came up with it. The slight pressure tightened even more and Rodney felt a thrill of joy race down his spine. Teyla stared at their hands, wide-eyed, and Rodney straightened his fingers to show her he wasn’t holding on and that it was all John. She smiled, her eyes shimmering, and bent close to John’s head to whisper soft encouragements.

Rodney closed his fingers around John’s hand and squeezed back, letting both of their hands drop back into the gel. He turned to the sphere. “Just the physics?”

“Physics knowledge only. All else. Remains.”

Rodney nodded. He glanced one last time at John then wiggled his fingers to break the weak grip. His heart was beating again, fluttering painfully in his chest. The walk from John’s side to the empty table was interminable, each step harder and not seeming to get him any closer. His legs were shaking too, and sweat was building on his palms.

When he finally made it to the slab and pushed himself up, he managed to somehow do it without falling over or losing his balance. He sat on the edge and watched the alien orb swing down in front of his face. Dozens of projects—he had dozens of projects going. How was he supposed to finish any of them? Some of them were important—really, really, not-exaggerating, not-just-being-arrogant important. He ran through them in his mind, wondering which ones he would lose completely.

A memory of John rose in his mind unexpectedly, and he saw the two of them sitting at facing computers playing their Ancient Sims game. It had turned out not to be a game, with almost disastrous consequences, but still…it had been his and John’s escape, their downtime those first few years on Atlantis. He saw John peeking over the top of the computer screen again, trying to figure out what Rodney was planning.

Rodney sighed and flexed the hand John had gripped only moments ago.

“Lie down,” the sphere said, and maybe Rodney had imagined it, but the voice sounded softer, more gentle. Maybe it understood what this was costing him.

“Okay,” he whispered and lay down.

Teyla was suddenly standing next to him. She grabbed his hand in both of hers and Rodney relaxed a little. He glanced at the panel on his other side and saw the surface wrinkle. Seconds later, he shivered as cool gel touched his arm and soaked into his t-shirt. Hadn’t it been hot? It was supposed to be hot. Maybe it would get hot later.

He shivered. The gel rose quickly and covered him, digging into his ears and filling his head with pressure. He had a final fleeting thought that he would die of an aneurysm before the alien got what it wanted, and then the alien ship flashed out of existence around him. He floated in darkness, feeling nothing—no pain, no pressure, no hot or cold. He was vaguely aware of his arms and legs as he twisted, suspended in a black void, and then even that winked out.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Teyla’s calves shook, the backs of her knees cramping from standing for so long, but she didn’t leave. John was once again submerged in the blue gel, and now Rodney was as well. She wrapped her arms around her middle and walked to John’s side. He looked much like he had when they’d first found him on the ship—pale and still. The blue matter cast a grayish pallor over his body.

She reached her hand out and pressed it against the firm substance. When they were “giving,” the gel seemed to harden. It was hot to the touch as well, much like Rodney had described happening during Ronon’s giving.

She stepped toward Rodney now and peered at him through his own block of gel. His expression was frozen in a grimace. As soon as the gel had begun to flow over him, he’d scrunched his face up and held his breath. The light in the panels above her two teammates was brighter than it had been with Ronon. It was almost a bar—a straight vertical line streaming from end to end and panel to panel.

A moan drew her attention to her third teammate, and she spun around to see Ronon shaking his head and pushing himself up. If there was anything that could have dragged her away from Rodney and John, he was it. She darted over to him, grabbing onto his arm as he straightened.

“Ronon!”

Ronon groaned again, pitching forward. Teyla caught him under his arms and leaned him back on the sofa. His head flopped on the cushion and he winced.

“Are you alright?” she whispered, brushing his hair away from his face. He was pale and sweaty, and his skin was almost too hot. He shivered at her touch but began to blink. Teyla ducked her head so that she was eye-to-eye with him and smiled when he finally managed to keep his eyes open.

He smiled back, though his gaze was glassy and bright. He grunted, smacking his lips together.

“How are you?” Teyla asked again.

Ronon lost none of the look of confusion on his face. His head was sagging into the sofa cushion, and he didn’t look like he had any strength to sit up or straighten his neck. His smile faltered a little as Teyla continued to watch him.

“What?” he finally whispered. He frowned, searching her face.

Teyla felt sudden apprehension twist in her heart. “Do you know who I am?”

Ronon blinked, drawing his eyebrows together. She could almost see his mind working as it tried to come up with a response. The alien had said it would only take Ronon’s memories of his childhood. Surely that meant his memories of her, their team, and his time on Atlantis remained intact?

Confusion dominated his expression, but Teyla saw a scrap of fear in his eyes now too. “I…” he started, then stopped, licking his lips.

“I am Teyla.”

“Teyla?” he rasped. The word flowed awkwardly from his tongue.

“Yes,” she answered. She reached a hand out to brush his cheek and smiled again. He echoed her, blinking heavily and losing none of his disorientation.

He sighed suddenly and rolled his head against the cushion to look around the room. “Where are we?”

“We’re on a ship. John was…John has been injured and we are trying to help him.”

“Who?”

Dread filled her chest and drained into her stomach. What had they done? Ronon was… There was definitely something wrong with him, and now Rodney was undergoing the same procedure. Had they acted too rashly after all? Rodney should have waited at least until they were sure Ronon was okay, but John’s situation had seemed tenuous and the alien sphere impatient.

She shook her head at the thought. That wasn’t right; they had been desperate, and desperation was making them do strange things—taking risks they might not otherwise take, at least not so quickly. Ronon was still staring at her, waiting for an answer. She stood, grabbing his arm and keeping him steady as he too climbed to his feet. He swayed, growing pale and pressing a hand to his stomach.

“What is wrong? Perhaps you should remain sitting.”

“Nah,” he grumbled, sounding much more like his old self. “Little dizzy. I’m okay.”

With a sigh, Teyla pointed toward the two slabs holding the other half of their team, and Ronon turned slowly toward them.

“What are they doing?”

“Rodney is transferring energy to John, to heal him.”

They stumbled their way across the room, weaving around the sofa and across the empty space between the furniture and the slabs jutting from the wall. Ronon threw his hand out a few times as he lurched forward, his balance still skewed. Halfway there, he stopped and rocked back on his heels and Teyla’s grip on his arm was the only thing that kept him upright.

When they finally reached John, Ronon leaned against the block of gel and let his forehead rest against the top. “Warm,” he muttered.

Teyla nodded, trailing fingers across the side. The gel was even warmer than it had been a few minutes earlier.

“He’s hurt.”

Her chest expanded painfully. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Is he breathing?”

“When this material is not covering him, he is,” Teyla answered. She leaned forward, mimicking Ronon’s pose and pressed her face against the rubbery gel to look at John’s face. “Whatever the…person…connected to this ship is doing, it appears to be working.”

“Who?”

Ronon was watching her again. The blank look in his eyes was unnerving and Teyla forced herself to smile. Ronon rubbed his face with his hand and looked around again, but before either of them could say anything else, the gel around John and Rodney began to pull back into the wall.

Ronon stared as the gel morphed and wavered, looking terrified, and Teyla wondered if it was sparking a memory of his own experience from a couple of hours earlier. The gel retracted completely from around Rodney, and Teyla stepped toward him.

Rodney groaned and rolled onto his side right away, and before Teyla could reach him, he sat up and slid off the slab. His legs buckled as soon as he hit the floor, and Teyla could only watch helplessly as he crawled a few feet then threw up. She knelt beside him, resting a hand on his back. He was shaking badly, and his face had a greenish hue to it.

“Rodney?” she asked. He had stopped gagging, but he was still breathing heavily, occasionally spitting the little moisture still in his mouth.

“Sick,” he mumbled.

Teyla turned back to Ronon, who was standing next to John and watching the two of them. “Ronon, help me.”

She turned back to Rodney and rubbed his back. He seemed okay at the moment, and she pulled on his arm to ease him up and away from the brown puddle in front of him. He moaned slightly at the movement and let his head hang forward.

Ronon hadn’t moved. Teyla glanced at him again and waved him toward them. “Ronon!”

He started, hesitating a second, but Teyla continued to look at him and eventually he walked over to them. Walk would be a generous description, she decided. He staggered forward, using the slabs to keep himself from flopping on his face.

Somehow, Teyla managed to get Rodney on his feet on her own, and she turned back to her other teammate, who was now leaning against the empty slab and watching her struggle to keep Rodney upright. “Help me,” she said to Ronon. “Grab his arm.”

Ronon did, but it wasn’t clear to Teyla if he was helping Rodney stay on his feet or using Rodney to check his own hesitant sense of balance. They tripped and swayed their way across the room, eventually reaching the sofa that had been occupied not too long before by Ronon. By that point, Rodney was shuddering, barely able to stand even with all of his weight on his teammates. Teyla guided him to the sofa and directed his collapse onto the cushions.

He flopped over and threw an arm over his eyes. Teyla picked his legs up and swung them onto the couch so that he was stretched out. Ronon was staring up at the ceiling, his eyes flitting from spot to spot.

Teyla grabbed his arm and dragged him to the sofa facing Rodney. “Stay with him,” she ordered.

Ronon dropped into the couch and narrowed his eyes at Rodney. “He looks like he’s going to throw up again.”

“If he does, help him. I need to check on John.”

“Who?” Ronon asked, but his attention was focused on Rodney and the possibility of him becoming sick.

Teyla clenched her jaw as emotions swirled within her. What was happening to them? Ronon had no idea who any of them were, and Teyla wasn’t even sure he knew himself. He hadn’t reacted to his name at all, only her frantic waving and pointing.

 _Please, let this work out,_ she pleaded. They were too deep into this situation to do anything but continue forward. Either they would all be okay, or none of them would, and at the moment it felt as if that outcome was entirely on her shoulders.

John was lying in a thin layer of gel again, just like before. She pressed her hand to his chest and reveled in its rise and fall. If she was going to get through this, she had to hold onto what was happening here, to this man. Where once he had been cold and lifeless, he breathed again. His heart beat beneath his battered ribcage and his skin was almost feverish hot and flushed pink.

She waited for the next step in his progress, not sure how that might manifest itself but confident that it would. After each giving, John had changed. Long minutes passed, and he continued to breathe quietly. He looked like he was in a deep sleep, the muscles in his face smooth. There was no pain or fatigue, no stress or anxiety. She pressed the palm her hand against his face and brushed his cheek with her thumb.

“John?” she whispered.

He didn’t react, and she grabbed his hand. He had squeezed Rodney’s hand, reacting to his presence without waking up. Perhaps he would do the same with her. She shook his hand and wiggled her fingers, but John’s hand remained limp.

A headache was beginning to pulse behind her eyes. She closed them, pinching the bridge of her nose and breathing deeply. It did little for the pain, but she felt a brief unraveling of tension in her shoulders. When she opened her eyes again, John was unchanged, and her heart fluttered with apprehension.

“John,” she said a little more loudly. She searched for his pulse in his neck and was relieved to feel it beating steadily under her touch. _Why was he not changing?_

She forced his head toward her and peeled back his eyelids, and her breath caught in her throat. For a brief moment, she’d seen his eyes. They were almost all black, the pupils completely dilated, and they had not reacted whatsoever to the sudden flood of light from the room. The memory of him lying dead in the forest slammed back into her.

Had it all been a lie? She let go of his face to search for his pulse again, if only to reassure herself. John’s gaze had been vacant and empty, and she knew that just because his body was alive did not mean his mind had been restored. She felt her throat constrict at the thought and her vision shimmered at the sudden welling of emotion. Be strong—she had to be strong. She looked over at her other two teammates. Rodney was asleep with Ronon now sitting at his feet, though he seemed a little oblivious to the sick man next to him. He was staring at his arm in wonder as he fingered the checkered tattoo.

She scanned the rest of the room. The alien sphere had disappeared during both givings but it had returned soon after Ronon’s. Where was it now? She moved back to John’s side and traced the bruises on his chest with her finger. They were looking worse now that his blood was pumping through his body again—more swollen, more colorful.

She looked up at the ceiling and called out to the alien. “There is no change. Why is he not improving?”

She waited, but no one responded. Ronon continued to stare at his own arm, twisting it around and around.

“Where are you?” she cried louder.

This time she saw she had caught Ronon’s attention, and he too was looking up at the ceiling. Teyla sighed. She could see in his face that he had no idea what she was looking for. Rodney mumbled, twisted onto his back, then settled into sleep again. She walked over to them and kneeled next to Rodney, taking his wrist and feeling his steady pulse. He was…she wasn’t sure he was okay, but he was not in danger at the moment. Ronon leaned back and looked like he was about to doze off again.

“Ronon?” she called out. She scooted toward him and touched his arm, causing him to jerk awake. He blinked at her, wary. “I need to leave this room,” Teyla said.

She had no idea what she was planning or where she would go, but they needed more information. Every ship had a control center; if there was an alien behind the floating sphere, that is where it would be. At the very least, her leaving might catch its attention and force it to communicate with her.

“What?” Ronon asked, looking around. “Why?”

“To look…” she started, then shook her head. “Never mind. I need you to watch over John and Rodney.”

Ronon stared at her then blinked when he realized she wasn’t going to say anything more. He looked around the room again and the fear was back, only stronger. Teyla’s heart constricted in her chest, and she grabbed his hand in both of hers, feeling it trembling slightly.

“Do you understand?”

He nodded, but he looked far from confident. Teyla pointed to Rodney. “Watch him,” she said. “Help him if he is sick again.”

“’Kay,” he mumbled, and he seemed to focus a little more on Rodney. It would have to do.

Teyla checked on John one last time, noting again the lack of change in his condition, then headed for the doors. She paused as she reached them, wondering if they would even open, but they slid apart at her approach without hesitation.

She stepped cautiously into the hall, but it was just as empty as it had been hours earlier. “Are you here? Can you hear me?”

Her voice echoed through the ship. She walked over to the nearest panel and pressed her hand against the firm gel. No light appeared; no indication that the alien had heard her call. Reluctantly, she continued down the hall.

The ship was a maze of corridors that didn’t seem to lead anywhere, and she found no transporters to get her to another level, not even the one they had arrived in. By the time she had worked her way back around to where she’d started, her throat ached from yelling at the alien creature to show itself. The ship—at least all the rooms on this level—was empty other than a smattering of beds, chairs, and tables. Fake potted plants.

She took a deep breath before walking back into the team’s room. She could only hope that Ronon had recovered a little more, or that John was showing the promised improvement, and she felt her heart plummet when the room looked exactly as she had left it. Ronon stood in front of a smaller panel behind the sofa, and Teyla noticed the surface had changed into a mirror. He alternated from fingering the tattoo on his neck to examining the one on his arm.

One thing was different. Rodney was sitting up with his head hanging in his hands. Teyla made a beeline for him, calling out his name.

“Rodney?”

Rodney jerked and looked up, and Teyla watched his face go from pale to green. He lunged for the potted tree at the end of the sofa and threw up. Teyla knelt next to him, holding his arm and rubbing the center of his back until he finished. When he sat back, she helped him over to the sofa.

“What are you feeling, Rodney?”

Rodney had scrunched forward again, folding his arms across his knees and laying his head down on top of them. “Headache,” came his mumbled reply. “Nauseous.”

“How is your memory?”

He lifted his head at that, but slowly. Dark circles ringed his eyes, giving him a haunted, desperate look. He let his eyes shift around the room, taking in as much as he could without moving.

“Where are we?” he asked, the same empty confusion filling his face that Teyla had seen in Ronon’s.

She stifled a sigh. “We are on a ship.”

He reacted immediately. “Ship?” he cried out. “I don’t remember a ship. What kind of ship? A boat? Is this a cruise? I always get motion sick.” He pressed a hand against his stomach and leaned forward with a moan. “Why would I take a cruise? I would only do this for a woman. Is there a woman—oh, are we…you know…?”

Teyla blinked at his outburst, her mind racing. She vaguely recalled other expedition members talking of cruises and had heard enough about them to know they were large, seafaring vessels taken during holiday trips on Earth.

“No, not…” She paused, taking a moment to compose herself. She needed to know how much Rodney had lost. “Do you know who you are?”

Rodney had been looking around the room in a panic, but he stopped at the question and frowned. “Of course I do. What kind of question is that?”

“I am just trying to assess your condition.”

“My condition? Did I hit my head? My head really hurts… My girlfriend must be really hot for me to have—”

“Your name!” Teyla called out, halting the building stream of words.

“Rodney,” he answered easily. He straightened up and scooted back until he was slumped into the sofa. “Rodney McKay. I’m…I have…no. I’m smart. I’m really smart—I remember being smart.” He paused, frowning. “I can’t…I can’t think of…”

This is what she had been afraid of. He remembered who he had once been, but she had no idea at what point that stopped. She pointed toward Ronon, who was still studying himself in the mirror.

“What about us?” she asked. “Do you remember us?”

“Do we know each other?” He dug his fingers into his temples and began massaging them. “I usually have a very good memory, more for numbers than people, though. I…I built an atomic bomb in my basement when I was a kid. I mean, not a real one—no one would give me any uranium or plutonium, go figure. It would have worked, though.”

He was staring straight ahead, lost in his thoughts as he muttered. “I did it alone…I know…I know how to do it…Am I a scientist?” He looked over at Teyla, pleading. “I thought I was a scientist. I used to be smart.”

He sucked in a ragged breath and tried to sit up, but he paled and swayed. Teyla grabbed onto him, wrapping an arm across his back as he leaned forward again and let his head hang between his knees.

“Rodney, try to relax,” she soothed.

He jerked under her hands and lifted his head enough to look at her. “Relax? How am I supposed to relax?” He’d gone pale again, and Teyla rubbed his back until he dropped his head again. She could just hear him muttering. “I’m on a cruise ship with a bunch of strangers and I don’t have any Dramamine and I’m supposed to be doing something important right now. I can’t remember what I’m supposed to be doing…”

“Is this guy okay?” Ronon called out.

Teyla looked up to see Ronon standing over John. He had wandered over to that side of the room without her noticing and he pointed at their teammate now. “He looks kinda dead.”

Rodney moaned next to her, gagging but not becoming sick again. “Oh, God. A dead body. What kind of cruise is this? I don’t want to see any dead people. When my grandmother died, my parents made me go to the viewing. I had nightmares for months afterward.” He groaned. “I think I’m going to be sick again…”

He lurched from under Teyla’s grasp and crawled over to the potted tree, wrapping his arms around the edge. Teyla was torn, wondering if she should stay with Rodney but needing to check on John. When Rodney wasn’t immediately sick, she left him and rushed over to Ronon and John.

Fear was crawling up her throat, threatening to overwhelm her. She could feel herself beginning to shake but she clamped it down. Ronon moved back as she approached, shifting nervously on his feet.

“Is he…”

John was breathing, same as before. Teyla’s knees buckled and she grabbed onto the side of the table to keep herself standing. “He is not dead. He is breathing.” She grabbed John’s hand and squeezed his fingers.

“Do you know him?” Ronon asked as he slid closer to her.

She nodded. “We are friends. We are all friends—teammates.”

Ronon pointed across the room. “Even that guy?”

“Yes, even Rodney,” Teyla said with a smile. As unlikely as it had seemed that they would bond as a team, they had—all of them—including Rodney and Ronon. “Will you check on him?”

Ronon shrugged. Rodney was still kneeling next to the tree, resting his head on his arms on the lip of the pot. Ronon looked a little steadier than he had been as he picked his way toward Rodney. Teyla leaned her hip against John’s table, listening to their conversation.

“You okay?” Ronon rumbled as he drew closer.

“No.” McKay’s voice was muffled but his response was clear even from across the room.

Ronon stood behind him, staring with his hands on his hips. “Are you going to throw up again?”

“Yes,” Rodney said, looking up at Ronon with a glare that morphed into a frown. “Well, maybe. I don’t know.” He pulled away from the tree and crawled back to the sofa. “I need to lie down. I hate cruises.”

He didn’t lie down, just slumped back in the sofa. Ronon eased himself onto the seat and sprawled next to him. He closed his eyes and lifted his hands to his head, kneading circles into his temples.

“My head hurts,” Rodney said.

“Me too.”

“I think I might be hungry.”

“Me too.”

Rodney glanced over at Ronon, scowling. “Do you say anything else?”

Ronon paused, opening his eyes for a moment to consider his answer. “Yes,” he said, letting his eyes close again and resuming his head massage.

“I’m surrounded by idiots,” Rodney grumbled, mimicking Ronon and massaging his own temples.

Teyla saw a smirk flit across Ronon’s face. “Me too.”

“Oh, God, I’m going to die,” he whined then snapped his head at Ronon. “Don’t say it. If you say _Me too_ one more time I’m going to scream.”

Ronon didn’t, and Rodney soon settled down next to him. They looked pale and drawn—beyond exhausted. For a moment, they had sounded so much like their old selves, but the familiar banality of the conversation had only filled Teyla with pain. They weren’t their old selves. Even if they recovered from their current disorientation and confusion, they had still lost integral parts of themselves, and they would never be the same.

And for what? Would it be enough to bring John back as he was before? And what would he say to them when he found out what they had sacrificed? Teyla suddenly realized that knowledge might be too much for him to bear, at least initially, and she resolved to keep the events of this day to herself as much as possible.

But she still had her giving. Would she be as confused and disoriented as Ronon and Rodney were? And what would the sphere ask of her? She reached over and ran her fingers through John’s hair, but he slept on. She stared at the blue panels behind him and the empty slab. “Help us,” she begged. “Please.”

No light appeared, no alien orb. Teyla felt anger and desperation surge through her. “Why have you gone?” she screamed. “You said that if we gave you energy you would heal John. Where are you?”

She waited but to no avail. A glance back toward Rodney and Ronon showed that they had sat up at her yell and were now watching her, looking nervous. She looked down at John and grabbed his shoulders. It would not end this way. Perhaps Rodney’s giving was healing his mind—something that might not manifest itself physically—but she needed to know.

She shook him, trying to get a response, but John didn’t react. She didn’t dare look at his eyes again—she was sure that would completely undo any sense of control she was still holding onto. Instead, she dug her hands under John’s arms and lifted him up.

He came out of the gel easily, limp arms and head flopping as she moved him. She perched herself on the edge of the table and leaned him forward, letting his head fall forward into the crook of her neck. He was warm and limber—alive.

“Please wake up, John,” she murmured as she rubbed his back. She could feel his spiky hair tickling her neck, the soft exhale of his breath. She held him, feeling his ribs expand with another slow, deep breath. He exhaled again and she reveled in it, remembering the desperate struggle on the planet to revive him.

She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath to clear her mind, but she started suddenly, glancing down at the lack of warm breath against her skin and the stillness of his ribcage beneath her embrace. She jumped off the table and eased him back down, wincing when his head flopped backward on a rubbery neck. Once she had him lying in the gel again, she leaned forward, one hand on his chest and her ear pressed to his mouth.

No breaths. He was not breathing. Ancestors above! What had she done? She dug her hands into the pulse point at his neck and felt no reassuring beat. Should she try CPR? She glanced at the bruising on his chest from their last attempt and felt her stomach cramp at the sight.

Before she could decide, John threw his head back, opening his mouth wide in a sudden gasp. Teyla felt her legs go weak, and it took all of her will power to keep herself upright. She grabbed his hand and pressed her fingers against his wrist. After the third breath, the first throb of a pulse beat beneath her touch.

She thought she had killed him—undid all the work that her teammates had already given so much for. Her eyes were rooted to his chest as it rose and fell, needing that reassurance that she hadn’t ruined everything. He was alive—he was still alive.

His face twitched and he rolled his head in the gel.

“John?”

A frown creased his forehead, and his eyebrows pulled down. She grabbed his hand, squeezing his fingers. With her other hand, she brushed the lines from his brow. He reacted, turning toward her and his eyelids began to flutter.

“I am here, John,” she whispered.

She felt his grip on her hand tighten in response to her voice, but he was still struggling to open his eyes. She waited, not daring to breathe. When he finally managed it, she smiled at the sight of his black pupils contracting in reaction to the light. He frowned and moaned, slamming his eyes shut again.

“John?” she called out again. He tried again to open his eyes, and almost succeeded, but after several seconds he sighed deeply and relaxed. Tense muscles in his face smoothed out as he slid back to sleep.

Teyla stood next to him for another moment, making sure he really was asleep and replaying the brief moment in her mind. She had not imagined it. The improvement she had sought had manifested itself. She walked over to the empty slab and pulled herself up. “I am here. I am ready,” she called out to the room as she laid down.

“What’s that lady doing?”

“That’s Teyla.”

“I don’t know any Teylas.”

“We’re a team.”

“Sports team? I don’t play sports.”

She could hear Rodney and Ronon’s conversation, their voices carrying easily across the room, but she ignored them. She closed her eyes, waiting for the gel to envelop her the way it had submerged the others. She forced her mind to slow down and concentrated on her breathing, letting her body relax on the table and prepare for…for whatever might come next.

A touch to her hand startled her and her eyes flew open to find Ronon leaning over her.

“Teyla?” he asked, his voice hesitant. He was timid and nervous, a reaction she had never seen on Ronon, not even imagined.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“Not sure,” he answered. “Think so. Is that guy okay yet?” he asked, nodding toward John.

“He is getting better. Do you remember what happened?”

“When?”

She sighed. “Never mind. Perhaps it will just take some time for you to remember.”

Ronon looked like he was ready to ask something else, but his head suddenly jerked behind him. Teyla twisted around on the slab in time to see Rodney stand up then blanch.

“Hey!” Ronon called out, running toward him. Unable to keep a straight line, he veered into the furniture a few times before he reached Rodney. He grabbed Rodney’s arms and guided him to the potted tree, where Rodney dropped to his knees and clung to the edge, looking like he was about to be sick again.

Teyla turned away and closed her eyes. “Please,” she whispered.

A light flashed across her eyelids and she jerked her eyes open. Had she fallen asleep? She had sensed no time passing, but now she could feel warm gel oozing around her body. She tried to lift her arms and found she was pinned to the table. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the blue panel on her left, a thousand bubbles trapped beneath its surface and blinking in an array of colors.

She shifted her eyes down the length of her body toward John, but she couldn’t see him. Ronon, Rodney—where were they? She tried again to move but was stuck solidly in the gel. She closed her eyes and pulled in a deep breath, feeling her lungs expand fully. She held her breath and counted slowly, willing herself to calm down. One of her two mobile—mostly mobile—teammates would come check on her. She opened her eyes again—

And gasped. A man stood over her, staring down at her. He had made no sound, just simply appeared. She struggled against the gel and felt a flutter of panic at her inability to move.

“Who are you?” she gasped out.

The man had dark wavy hair and dark eyes. He wore white clothes, loose around the neck but otherwise form fitting and revealing a lean, muscular physique beneath. “We are the ship, Solus Emendo,” he answered. His voice was deep, reverberating in Teyla’s head. “Once I was as you are—a physical being. Now my body and soul is this ship, inextricably linked.”

His voice was rich and warm, enveloping Teyla in its confidence and intelligence, but she shivered, feeling suddenly uneasy and on edge. “You sound different,” she said. Was he the sphere that had spurred them along this path? Had Ronon and Rodney also met this man?

“The _davao_ brings us together in a sharing, allowing us to communicate together.”

“Davao?”

The alien nodded toward the blue gel of the panels and the liquid gel surrounding her.

 _Solus Emendo,_ Teyla thought. It was easier to think of the alien by his name, now that she could see him. The sphere had been little more than a computer, but this man… Who was he? _What was he?_ She took in as much of his clothing as she could, but the gel continued to impede her ability to move her head and look around. The clothes almost looked similar to the style of the uniforms the men and women on the intercepted Ancient ship had worn, but still obviously different. The similarities could be nothing more than coincidence.

She strained her ears for any sign of Ronon or Rodney but heard nothing. “The others,” she said, “there is something wrong with their minds.”

Solus’s expression remained unchanged, but his voice softened. “The transfer process is difficult, and with time, they will recover.”

“How much time?”

“You need not concern yourself with that,” Solus answered.

Teyla felt ice run through her body, Solus’s demeanor setting her more intensely on edge. In some ways, he reminded her of the men she’d seen in the Earth magazines modeling clothes, but he was flawless and handsome in every aspect, but it was that perfection that was setting of alarms in Teyla now.

“They are my team,” she said. “How much time?”

Solus seemed unfazed as he stared down at Teyla. “Already they are recovering. They have provided much energy. It was…exhilarating.”

Again, his expression hadn’t changed as he spoke, but his eyes shifted, growing brighter. Teyla blinked, wondering what he had meant. He’d almost sounded…hungry. He closed his eyes now, letting a small smile lift the corner of his mouth—the first physical sign Teyla had seen of any emotion. Her heart began to pound in her chest.

“What about John?”

“You have seen for yourself,” Solus answered, opening his eyes to look down at her. “Where once he was without life, he lives and breathes.”

But would he be himself? Would he be _John?_ The question had been weighing on her since this entire process had started. The sphere had convinced them it could give John what they were all so desperate for, but she flashed to Rodney and Ronon, their confusion and disorientation. Too many questions, too many ways this could go wrong. She struggled against the gel, needing to see her teammates again.

“You must relax,” Solus said. “Your friend requires one final gift.”

Despite his appearance and the flowing rhythm of his voice, he suddenly sounded less human than the stilted computerized voice of the floating orb.

“What is it you ask of me?” Teyla asked. She had tried to ignore the question of what the alien might ask of her but now it was here, slapping her in the face. She had yelled at this ship until she was hoarse asking for her opportunity to give her gift. But now…

“You are Athosian, are you not?” he asked, and Teyla blinked, her racing mind stuttering to a stop.

“Yes. How—”

“The Athosians were once a great people, ever loyal to the Alterans.”

Solus was looking at her, but his eyes lost their focus, dulling as he spoke. Alteran—she knew that word. Her mind churned sluggishly, trying to pull up the information. _Ancient,_ she thought. The Ancients had called themselves Alterans.

“How do you know of these things?” she asked, cringing at the faint quiver in her voice.

“I know many things about you, Teyla Emmagen.” Solus refocused his gaze on her, his eyes bright, piercing. He reached a hand out and set it on her stomach. The warmth of his palms soaked into her skin.

“What are you doing?” she breathed out, wanting to yell but finding her throat constricting, cutting off her air supply.

“Your people are missing. Taken.”

She felt her heart skip a beat. “Do you know where they are?” She heard the desperation in her voice, hated it, but if Solus knew something about her people…

“I know many things, but not all. You alone remain, possibly the last of your people, save for the child who grows within you.”

If Teyla had been worried before, she was terrified now. Solus pressed his hand a little harder into her stomach, right over the area where her baby was growing. She wasn’t showing much yet, but in another month or two, it would be obvious to all. She froze against his touch, feeling her heart pound up into her throat as her fear skyrocketed.

“You would give much for your friend, John, would you not?” Solus asked, his eyes blazing. She felt his hand move slightly against her skin as if he could cup the small life. Scoop it right out of her.

She opened her mouth to reply but closed it again and worked some moisture back into her throat. “There are some things John would not want me to give, even if it meant his death,” she finally whispered, recoiling as much as was possible in the gel when Solus leaned a little closer to her.

“You mean there are things you would not give, even if it meant his death.” The muscles in his face had been smooth, his alabaster skin giving Teyla the impression she was talking to a marble statue, but now the corners of his mouth curled upward again. His eyes were dark, boring into Teyla’s soul.

“What do you want?” Teyla asked, unable to drag her gaze away from the man leaning over her. In the minute twitches of his chiseled expressions, she saw hunger. Ravenous hunger.

“I have told you already,” Solus answered, his voice taking on a timbre of calm logic. “For your friend to live, he must be give a past, present, and future. Ronon Dex has given his past—everything he once was; Rodney McKay has given his present—all that he is now.”

Through the wave of panic threatening to drown her, her mind caught on to one word and she clung to it. “All?” she asked, shouting out the word. Solus flinched slightly, perceptible only in the tightening around his eyes. “You said you would only take a piece of his intelligence,” Teyla pressed. Anger flooded through her, mixing with the fear and dread already battering her. She latched onto, using it to ground her and clear her mind.

Solus didn’t move for a moment, staring at her with an intensity that bathed her skin in cold terror. “That is what I meant,” he finally said.

“I do not believe you.”

He ignored her, curling his fingers and digging his fingertips into the sides of her stomach. “From you, I will take the future.”

“My child?” she whispered.

“He is more than your child, is he not? He is the future of your people, possibly the last Athosian in this entire universe.”

“No,” she said with a rush of air.

Solus let his eyebrows rise slightly. “You refuse?”

“I cannot give up my child,” Teyla answered. Sweat had broken out across her forehead, and she licked her lips. She felt her stomach buck under Solus’s touch, sudden nausea blazing and clawing at the back of her throat.

“Not even for John? He will not heal without your gift.”

If she could have closed her eyes, she would have, but she couldn’t even blink. Her eyes burned but stayed locked on Solus’s face. “He would not want me to do this. He would never—”

“And what of your other friends, Rodney and Ronon?” Solus asked. He stood up a little straighter, giving Teyla a few inches of space, and nodded his head to a spot over his shoulder. “They have already made the sacrifice; they have already given _so_ much.”

“No.” Her answer was barely audible, little more than a tightening of her vocal cords.

“Then you condemn them—all of them.”

“You said Rodney and Ronon would recover,” Teyla cried out, finding her voice again after a sharp inhale.

“Recover, yes,” Solus answered. A myriad of expressions flitted across his face, so brief Teyla almost missed it. _Glee. Excitement. Power._ “They will live,” he continued, “but a part of them has been taken forever. That has certain…effects.”

“You promised they would be the same!” The anger was back, hot and strong. She tried to sit up and struggled in vain against the gel still holding her down.

“I did not,” Solus responded, his eyes dancing. “I said they would recover. They will live, and one day they will be able to function in their societies—perhaps not to the level they had achieved prior to their giving, but enough. They will even be happy, not knowing who they once were and what they once had.”

“You lied.”

“I did not.”

“You did not tell us the true cost of this giving.”

“Would you have given it had you known? Would any of you?”

“John would not want us to give up so much.”

“Ah, John,” Solus said, and this time he did smile. He glanced at the other slab where Teyla knew he still lay then back at her. “What do you think will happen to him if you continue to refuse?” He paused, but Teyla had no answer for him. Would he die? He’d already been dead, and perhaps, she realized with a flood of grief, they should have let him go.

“He will not die,” Solus said, as if reading her thoughts. “The sacrifice of the others has not been in vain.”

“Then what—”

“His heart will beat, his lungs will expand. He will live, but nothing more. You saw the vacancy in his eyes, did you not? He will know nothing: he will not be able to speak or understand anything spoken to him; he will not be able to walk or move. Someone will have to feed him and bathe him and care for him every second of every day for the rest of his life.” The look was back—the hunger and greed in his eyes. “A sad fate for such a strong man,” he said, feigning disappointment but everything this creature said to her was false—had been since the moment they’d woken up on this ship. “He was so vibrant on the planet below. The life-energy gathered from him alone was…it was almost overwhelming. Never have I tasted such…vitality.”

Teyla felt her chest tighten, squeezing the air out of her lungs. Her stomach clenched and she swallowed desperately against the urge to gag as she realized what Solus was saying. “Tasted…,” she started. She saw the hunger flash again in his eyes, a look she had seen all too often on another type of creature. “You did it on purpose. You took John’s life on purpose.”

Solus neither admitted nor denied it. “The past cannot be changed,” he said. He rubbed her stomach, kneading the muscles stretched over her abdomen. “It is the future you must concern yourself with now.”

“You fed off his life,” Teyla spat. “You are no better than the Wraith.”

Solus’s eyes flared, and his stony expression broke completely. “I am more than all of the Wraith combined, and all of humanity,” he screamed. He raised his hands above his head, encompassing the room, the ship, possibly the entire galaxy in the swoop of his arms. “Can you give and take life so easily? Do you have command over the elements with a single thought?”

“And Rodney and Ronon? Did you feed off their life-energy as well?”

Solus dropped his arms, glaring at Teyla. “I tire of this conversation: make your decision. Will you give the final gift or will you sacrifice John’s existence? Will you make the sacrifice of your teammates all for naught?”

“If you are as powerful as you say, will you not take what you want anyway?”

“A gift forcibly taken is not as _potent_ as one freely offered,” he answered. “There is much energy in your anger and distress—so much energy. For now, I leave the decision in your hands, Teyla. What will it be?”

He pressed his hand deeper into her stomach and she winced. His grip on her was becoming painful. How hard would he need to push before he hurt the child within her? She was still pinned to the table, trapped within the gel, and she had seen no sign of the others.

If Solus was as powerful as he was claiming, and Teyla had no reason to doubt him on this after what he had done to her other teammates, what could Ronon or Rodney do? The last time she had seen them, they’d both been barely able to stand. Even if they tried to stop Solus, they’d already made their sacrifice, given up fundamental parts of themselves.

And John. To stop now would be to consign him to a life of non-existence. Memories flashed through her mind. She saw his face lighting up at the sight of fresh sausage that morning in the breakfast line, not knowing anyone was watching him. She saw him and Rodney drawing obscene cartoons on the edges of the papers Woolsey passed out at every meeting and their attempts to conceal their amusement and stifle their laughter as the bureaucrat spoke. She saw him racing Ronon up the hill on the planet below, flushed and happy.

He had exploded when she’d told him of her pregnancy. In retrospect, she’d understood where his reaction had come from, but it had cut deeply. With all of her people missing, without the support most of all of Kanaan, her teammates were all she had left. Doubt battled with hope on a daily basis that the Athosians would one day be found.

Her memory shifted to later that evening, long after she’d been given a clean bill of health from Doctor Keller. John had come to her room, knocking softly and jarring her from the doze she’d drifted into. He had told her years before that he wasn’t good at talking about his emotions, but he didn’t need words. Teyla had seen his apology in his eyes as soon as she’d opened her door, saw shame clash with sorrow. He’d stared at her stomach a moment then up at her face, opening his mouth and snapping it shut right away. Pain filled his eyes—pain at what he’d said, pain at hurting her, pain at the loss of her people and the knowledge of how alone she had to be feeling. She’d lunged at him, and unlike the other times she’d embraced him, she felt him hug her back immediately, his grip strong. It was a moment of shared pain, as valuable to Teyla as any of their most joyful times together.

But it was her child. Her _son._ As Solus had said, it was possibly the entire future of her people. That had been his terms from the beginning—a past, present, and future. Could she lose her team to save her son? Could she lose her son to save her team? Neither option was acceptable.

 _Was there a third?_ Her mind raced. Solus had tricked them into this situation in the first place, manipulated them until he got exactly what he wanted by promising what they so desperately needed. A teardrop of moisture breached the corner of her eye and ran back into her hair, and she felt her defenses crumble. What could she do? Her son was innocent in all of this, but then again, so was John. So were Ronon and Rodney. So was she.

The only other possible path was to give no answer. To not make the choice. Solus had misled them already, and she had no reason to believe he would carry through on his pledge to restore John’s life. She could refuse to make a decision between her son and her team, but she’d seen the hunger in Solus’s eyes. How long would he let her stall?

Who was to say he wouldn’t keep them all captive indefinitely, feed more and more off Ronon and Rodney until they were as vacant as John was threatening to become? Who was to say Solus wouldn’t continue to play with John’s life, manipulating his breaths and beating heart before Teyla’s eyes? And if she waited, if she let him torture her until she finally gave him what he wanted—because she knew no one could hold out forever—what then? She would lose all of them—John, Rodney, Ronon, her son. All of their lives, on her soul forever.

“Decide!” Solus’s scream cut through her thoughts, the knife-edge of his voice raking through her. She gasped at the pain left in its trail, pain as real as if he’d attacked with physical weapons. Her abdomen clenched in reaction to a muscle spasm too close to her child. Solus stared at her, his mouth curled back in an open sneer. Hunger danced across his face, perverse satisfaction drowning his dark, lifeless eyes as he reveled in her struggle.

John’s life or her son’s. She knew what John would tell her to do. She saw him again, struggling to find the words on her doorstep so many nights ago. If he found out what his return to life had cost—what his team had sacrificed for him—that might destroy him as surely and completely as Solus’s actions on the planet. She could lose her son to save John only to lose him too, but she could choose her son, saving him in this moment, only to lose him in the next.

Solus had asked for her future, but the future was all she had, what she reached for with every passing day. Her team, her child, her people. To give or withhold her gift of a future—the choice itself would destroy them all. It would haunt the days that passed, eat alive the living moment, blacken the hope of every possible tomorrow…

She closed her eyes, feeling tears course silently down the sides of her face as she waited for the world to collapse around her and free her of this nightmare.

* * *

 **Part 4**

John opened his eyes to the blue-gray ceiling of Atlantis. He felt heavy and lethargic, like he’d overslept, and he let his eyes drift closed. Why was he so tired? He hoped to hell he wasn’t coming down with something. The last thing he needed at the moment was a cold, not that there was ever a good time to get sick, but his team was slated to investigate some old ruins and it involved a bit of a hike through the woods…

 _No, wait._ Hadn’t they already done that? He vaguely recalled seeing the city ruins sprawled out on the top of a plateau, a sea of dark green around it. Ronon had been standing up and leaning over his and McKay’s shoulders as they’d flown over the area, excitement dancing in his eyes at the idea of the day-long hike. He remembered McKay groaning when he’d set the jumper down a couple of miles from their destination and Teyla humming contentedly throughout.

So they’d already done the mission. Strange that he didn’t remember the actual hike or the ruins. He opened his eyes again and blinked at the ceiling. Then frowned. It was the right color, but it looked…odd. This wasn’t his room. He looked around as he sat up, and realized two things at once: one, this wasn’t Atlantis, and two, he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

His heart picked up its pace, slamming in his chest. He’d been lying on a table, one of those metal tables that reminded him way too much of the sterile slabs he’d seen in morgues, at least in the movies, but he had no memory of how he’d gotten here. He jumped off the slab, shivering, and as his feet hit the floor, he realized that his boots and socks were also missing. And his belt. And all of his weapons. He supposed he should be grateful he still had pants on, but what the hell?

He searched the large room, seeing another metal slab next to his and a collection of furniture and fake trees at the other end. Where the hell was his team? What had happened to them? He rubbed the side of his head, trying to remember anything. He remembered they were supposed to go on a mission today. He remembered the mess hall had been serving sausage for breakfast…

He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose as he tried to force the memories to surface. They’d made it to the planet—he remembered flying through the gate and checking out the area before landing. He saw flashes of images. Trees and hills. Him and Ronon running up a hill then waiting for Teyla and McKay. Hunters bursting out of the trees around them.

Teyla. _Shit._ The planet was supposed to be uninhabited. It had been—he’d scanned it as they’d flown over the city ruins. There’d been no one within a hundred-mile radius of their landing spot. But he remembered the hunters now, screaming as they flung themselves at his team, crude but still lethal weapons in hand. Teyla was pregnant; this was supposed to be a safe mission, one where they could all just relax and be together for the day.

His memories stopped there, at the attack, and he opened his eyes. Whoever they’d been, they didn’t look like they lived in…this place. Whatever it was. The architecture reminded him of Atlantis—so, definitely Ancient—but there was something off about it. He padded quietly to the wall and pressed his hand against it.

It was humming. Not the way Ancient gadgets or the chair sometimes hummed in the back of his head, but actually vibrating. A ship? That was what it felt like—the vibrating rumble of an engine being carried through the walls. The door was only a dozen feet or so from him and he walked toward it, relieved when it opened immediately at his approach. The hallway beyond was empty, covered in blue panels that felt spongy under his fingertips, like Jell-O.

His heart began beating raggedly, sending a spike of adrenaline coursing through his veins. Where was his team? Had they been captured? Were they hurt? He took stock of himself as he walked silently down the hall. He was missing a few articles of clothing, but he wasn’t bleeding. There were no bruises or other visible injuries anywhere on his body, and now that he was up and moving around, he didn’t really feel all that tired. He peered around each corner and strained his ears for any sound of someone else, wondering if he should start yelling for his teammates.

The halls were abandoned, the doors lining them locked tight. He circled back to the room where he’d started, partly in fear that he wouldn’t be able to find it again if he ventured too far and partly because it was the only room that wasn’t locked. Maybe there was something he’d missed in the room. It had looked pretty empty—just the morgue tables, the sofas and the fake trees, but maybe—

A light flashed from just under the door, and he stepped into the room. He froze, his heart climbing into his throat. He’d only been gone for a few minutes, but there were people here now. Was this the same room? He was sure it was. As much as McKay liked to give him a hard time, his sense of direction wasn’t _that_ bad. He reached automatically for the weapon usually holstered at his thigh and remembered only after his hand slapped his leg that it had been taken.

The morgue tables were occupied now—the one where he’d been lying looked like it held a dead body and he let his eyes skitter over it quickly. On the other table, he could see the person’s legs, but a man was bending over the upper half and blocking John’s view.

He’d froze as soon as he’d entered, and he stayed frozen now as he realized that the man examining the body hadn’t seemed to notice him. He hadn’t reacted at all to the door sliding open at John’s approach. John forced himself to take deep slow breaths, tightening the muscles in his gut as he exhaled to dampen the jittery sensation the adrenaline rush was giving him. He turned his head slowly, picking out two more people on the other side of the room with their backs to him.

He recognized Ronon immediately, the man’s dreadlocks hanging around his shoulders as he bent forward, and John relaxed. Ronon was okay, and…McKay—McKay was kneeling next to him and leaning toward one of the potted trees. John stepped toward them, raising his hand, and was about to call out to them when he realized they still hadn’t moved.

He stopped and glanced at the man bending over the metal table against the far wall. He was in the exact same position, like God had hit pause on the remote control of life but forgot about him. He took another step toward Ronon and McKay, grimacing when he realized McKay looked like he was about to throw up.

 _Was Teyla also frozen?_ As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he recognized the feet on the second table and he snapped his head in that direction. He’d moved far enough across the room that the stranger was no longer blocking his view of the person he was bending over.

“Teyla!” he screamed. He ran forward, hurtling over the couches toward her. The stranger didn’t move, nor did Teyla, but John could see the fear in her face as he got closer. Whatever this man was doing—or about to do—to her had terrified her, and Teyla was not one who scared easily.

“Get away from her, you bastard,” he roared. He dove toward the man—

And passed right through him. He saw his outstretched arms slice through the man’s upper body, disappearing beneath his white clothing, and then he slammed into the table. He caught the edge of the metal slab in the stomach and he grunted as pain sparked in his vision. He fell forward, saw his hands slide through Teyla as if she were a hologram, then toppled backward.

He landed on his back and immediately curled up into a ball. His chest felt paralyzed and he threw his head back with a gasp until his lungs finally remembered how to breathe. He pressed his head again the cool floor and wrapped his arms around his stomach until the line of pain across his gut from where he’d hit the table dialed back to a dull throb.

A minute passed, and John opened his eyes to see his feet had disappeared into the stranger’s holographic legs, and he jerked them away. The stranger hadn’t moved and John could hear no sound in the room except the faint hum of a distant engine beneath him. He rolled onto his back slowly and grimaced as he pushed himself to a sitting position. Muscles pulled painfully along his abdomen.

He stood up, grabbing onto the nearest sofa for support. The furniture at least was real. He glanced over at his two other teammates. “Ronon! Rodney!”

They didn’t respond. He shivered, wishing he’d at least been able to keep his t-shirt. The rest of his team had shirts. Why the hell had they taken _his_ shirt? And who had taken them? His eyes drifted back to the stranger and something clicked. The clothes—the uniform. Like the ship that reminded him of Atlantis, the clothes reminded him of the uniforms the Ancients had worn—both the ones in the virtual reality and the ones they’d picked up near the intergalactic bridge. They weren’t exactly the same, but the similarities were too close.

He stepped up to the stranger again and swung his arm through the man’s chest. Static electricity danced up the nerves in his limb. There was just enough of a jolt that he jerked his arm away in surprise, but it hadn’t exactly been painful and as soon as he’d pulled his arm out of the man, the sensation disappeared.

“What the hell?” he muttered.

A flash of light reflected in the blue Jell-O panels in front of him, and he spun around at the sound of a woman’s voice.

“John Sheppard.”

It wasn’t a question. She stared at him, her gaze intent. Her face and shoulders were clear, but the rest of her body disappeared into bright light, tentacles of energy licking and snapping at the air around her. She was beautiful and much older than him, if the lines in her face were anything to go by, and floating. The light stopped a foot off the ground, and she hung there, motionless as she studied him.

“Who are you? What’s going on?” John demanded. He licked his lips as his mouth went dry.

“I was once as you are, flesh and blood and bone. I was known then as Ibaya,” the woman answered. Her voice rang in his head, thrumming through his body, and he shivered again.

“Ibaya?” he repeated.

“I lived my days in the sparkling city, among the ocean waves and sea breeze.”

John’s breath caught in his chest. “Atlantis? You’re an Ancient?”

He’d asked the question, but he already knew the answer. What else could she be? He’d read the descriptions in the SGC’s reports about Ascended beings, and he couldn’t imagine who or what else she might be.

Ibaya nodded, a single tilt downward of her head. She wasn’t smiling exactly, but she didn’t look angry or threatening. Not that he knew what that might look like on Ascended Ancients—he was shooting from the hip, so to speak. He dropped his hand to his leg again and brushed his fingers against his pant leg. Damn, he wished he had his gun right now.

“What happened here?” he asked, when Ibaya continued to stare at him.

“The man behind you was once known as Lasbatan,” Ibaya answered. “He was a great scientist, a leader among my people, but there was a darkness in him—a darkness that ran too deep for even the strongest to hold back, and he succumbed.”

She sounded sad, and a frown crossed her face as she regarded the stranger—Lasbatan—bending over Teyla.

John scowled, irritated. “Can we skip the history lesson and jump to the part where you tell me what the hell is going on? What’s he doing to Teyla?”

Ibaya’s eyes shifted to his, and he recoiled a little. She seemed to be staring straight into his soul and the sensation was unnerving.

“You have encountered the Ascension machine.”

“Yeah,” John answered, wary now at where she was going with this. If whatever was happening here had anything to do with the Ascension machine…Shit, that thing had almost killed McKay.

“Many of us believed Ascension was meant to be a journey, a test of whether or not we could take the lessons given to us in life and learn from our experiences, to grow up out of the hardships and struggles of mortal existence. Lasbatan, and a few of his followers, believed otherwise.”

John glanced at Lasbatan. “He invented the Ascension machine?”

“As a means to speed up the process. You must understand, John, the war with the Wraith was not going well. Lasbatan built his machine and promised thousands the opportunity to escape the war and live eternally as pure energy.”

He was missing something, but he forced himself to be patient. He took a deep breath and stepped away from Teyla and Lasbatan, moving closer to Ibaya. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“It was a lie,” she answered, and John tensed at the flash of anger that rippled out of her. It was almost tangible, and he folded his arms protectively across his chest. “Thousands of our people died as a result,” Ibaya continued, “though Lasbatan defended his invention based on the few who had managed to achieve Ascension because of it. In truth, those few would have ascended eventually, but the others…” she shook her head, and the anger dissipated, replaced with a wave of sadness that crashed over John. He clenched his jaw and pushed back against Ibaya’s emotions. It was a strange sensation—he could physically feel the sadness and anger but at the same time he knew it didn’t belong to him.

“One day they might have achieved a higher state, but they were not given a chance. Lasbatan tricked them into testing his machine so that he could perfect it. When the council finally discovered what he was doing, he was sentenced to death—a rare punishment among my people.”

“He doesn’t look very dead to me,” John said, raising an eyebrow.

Ibaya frowned. “He escaped. He stole a ship and the information he had garnered from the Ascension machine and left this galaxy to pursue it. He changed his name to Solus Emendo, implying his path was the only correct one, himself the sole authority in this universe. He was looking for a way to guarantee his Ascension, and he sacrificed thousands of more lives in his journey as he traveled across the galaxies. He managed to ascend part way, but he is tied to this ship.”

John moved farther away from Lasbatan. If this guy was bad enough that the Ancients had wanted him dead… He swallowed and turned back toward the Ascended being. “What does he want with me and my team?”

“He is trapped—neither wholly physical nor pure energy. He began harvesting the humans he encountered on his journey, taking their innate energy to feed his ship and himself, believing it would complete his Ascension. Now, to go without a fresh infusion of energy, is pure anguish. He has become dependent.”

John felt his stomach flip with sickening realization. “You’re telling me he’s a crack head? An energy addict?”

“Yes, John.”

“Then do something about it. Stop him!” he yelled. “My team—”

“Is in grave danger,” Ibaya finished, and yet she was _still standing there._ “Lasbatan has been away from this galaxy for thousands of years, eluding us and impeding our attempts to pursue him and bring an end to his vile feedings. I am afraid that we had lost him until he returned.”

“Returned and began feeding on my team,” John spat.

“Not your team,” Ibaya said, shaking her head. “You, John.”

John froze. _Him?_ “Me?” he said out loud.

Ibaya had been staring at him the entire time she’d been speaking, but now she looked toward the table next to Teyla’s. The one that held the other body. The one he’d woken up on.

He looked and saw the hair first. His heart seized in his chest as he recognized himself. Ibaya floated closer, and John walked over to the table. It was him—there was no doubt about it. He looked at his own chest then to the dead version of himself. Maybe not dead, but he looked dead with everything frozen. Dead John’s chest was covered in dark bruises, the rest of his skin paler than he’d remembered seeing himself look when he’d been getting dressed that morning. His double was also dressed the same, only wearing pants. Dark circles around his eyes gave him a haunted, battered look. _What the hell had happened to him?_

“Lasbatan ripped the life-energy from you so violently that it ended your life in an instant,” Ibaya said, and John wondered if she could read his mind. He reached out to touch his dead counterpart and grit his teeth at the shock that raced from fingertip to shoulder as his hand passed through the bruised chest.

Ibaya moved closer until she was hovering at dead—frozen, whatever—John’s feet. “Your team tried valiantly to revive you, but there was nothing left but a shell. They were transporting your body home when Lasbatan intercepted them with his ship.”

John swallowed, staring mesmerized at the bruises swelling across his sternum and ribs. CPR. They must have done CPR for…God, how long did they try to save him? From the looks of the bruising, it had to have been hours. “My body?” he whispered.

“You were dead, John. Lasbatan convinced your friends that your death was an accident and that he could revive you, if only they offered a piece of their own life-energy.”

He jerked, and for a moment he felt his entire body stop—as frozen as Lasbatan and his teammates. “What…what did he take from them?” he breathed out.

“He lied then took what they held most dear. He promised your life in exchange for a past, present, and future, and they believed him. From Ronon Dex, he took his memories of Sateda, of his childhood and family and the world that means so much to him.”

John’s head spun and he gripped the metal table to keep from falling over. Sateda? That was… Ronon was… _Damn it._ “Why would he…?” he started but couldn’t finish. He glanced over his shoulder toward his tall friend and saw him still bending over McKay.

“From Rodney McKay, he took his intelligence—all of his most advanced knowledge despite promising he would only take part. From Teyla Emmagan, he will take her child.”

John jerked, and his knees began to fold beneath him. He pushed away from the table and staggered toward Teyla, somehow managing to keep upright. “No, not that,” he cried, pain and anger exploding in his chest. He clamped a hand over his ribs, expecting to feel the same bruises he’d seen on his double. When he reached the head of Teyla’s table, he spun to face Ibaya. “Don’t let him take that. _Please._ I can’t…” He dragged a trembling hand over his face and bent over until his forehead rested on the table inches from her frozen, terrified, heart-wrenching face. “Teyla, why? Why would you do that?”

The pain was a tightening vice around his ribs, and he forced stubborn lungs to expand. He lifted his head to look at Teyla again, but his eyes fastened on Lasbatan. Up until now, he’d only seen the man from behind, but from this position he could see his face—the greed and hunger in his expression, the hand clawing at Teyla’s stomach.

He lunged toward the stranger, passing through him again, and he whimpered at the snap of energy that whipped through his body.

“She has not done so yet,” Ibaya said. “Once we became aware that Lasbatan was here, we knew we must intervene, but we could not reach him until now.”

“Stop him! Don’t let him do this to her,” he ordered. He looked at Teyla again but turned away at the expression carved into her face, noticing for the first time the glistening tracks of tears that had run down the side of her face into her hair. “God, this mission was supposed to be a cakewalk—a hike up to some ruins and back. The planet wasn’t even supposed to be inhabited.”

“It is not. The hunters you encountered were not real but a creation of Lasbatan, to observe how you reacted and test the level of your devotion to each other. Once he determined that you would give your lives to protect each other, he took advantage of it.”

McKay looked sick. Ronon had lost his home. Teyla was… he swallowed and looked at his own, frozen body. Was he dead? Lasbatan had taken everything before any of them had known what was happening. He felt his legs beginning to shake, and he stumbled toward the sofa and leaned against the back of it.

“Now what?”

Ibaya tilted her head, studying him again with that soul-piercing gaze. “We do not interfere in mortal existence, but Lasbatan is a…unique case,” she answered. “He is neither mortal nor immortal, and the Council of the Ascended has decided that this gives them room to intervene.”

“You’ll kill him?” John asked, his eyes shifting to Lasbatan’s back, glad he couldn’t see the expression on his face.

Ibaya shook her head. “We do not know if he can be killed in his current state. We will banish him to a distant galaxy. It is young and without intelligent life, so there will be no one for him to feed on. Once there, we will destroy his ship. He will perish or he will be trapped in that location forever, but either way, the rest of the universe will be safe from any further damage he may inflict.”

John nodded. That would have to do. If the Ascended Ancients weren’t even sure what they could do to Lasbatan, what could he possibly add? He looked back at Rodney and Ronon, then Teyla, then back to Ibaya. “What about us? What about my team?”

“What about them?”

Ibaya did not blink, just stared impassively at him. John felt his heart trip again in his chest as it began to beat frantically and he stood. His arms shook at the renewed anger that flooded his system, curling his fingers into fists. He stepped toward Ibaya, uncowed when she did not react to his advance.

“You can’t just leave us like this.”

“You are mortal,” she said, like it was the most reasonable explanation in the world. “The rules of non-interference do not exclude you or your team.”

“But Lasbatan did this to us, and you’re interfering with him.”

“What would you have us do?”

“Fix it!” John yelled. “Give Rodney and Ronon what they’ve lost. Save Teyla and her child.”

Ibaya blinked, and the light around her grew a little brighter. “They gave of themselves freely to save you. You would give it back to them?”

“Yes!”

“Even if it cost your life?”

“Yes! God, yes! Take it! Whatever Lasbatan gave me to bring me back, give it to them.”

“You sacrifice without thought to your own well-being.”

Was she playing him now, the way Lasbatan had played his team? It sure as hell felt like it. He stuck his chin out, mimicking the pose he’d seen on McKay so many times. He crossed his arms and steeled himself, meeting Ibaya’s deep gaze.

“You have much potential, John Sheppard,” she said finally. “The path you are on now, if you continue it, will one day bring you to Ascension.”

“I don’t want Ascension. I want my team back the way they were, before Lasbatan milked them for all they were worth.”

“Very well.”

And before John could say another word, the light around Ibaya grew, filling the room until it was too bright for him to keep his eyes open. He slapped a hand over them and turned his head away from her. He heard a sound—a deep, resonating gong that shook the floor—then felt a lance of pain through his chest, more painful than anything he’d ever felt before. An instant later, light snapped to darkness, and John felt the floor disappear beneath his feet with a crack.

ooooooooooooooooo

Hearing returned first, a jumble of sounds assaulting his ears. Wailings and beeping, and the incessant rattling of metal hitting metal. John felt it next. The jumper shuddered beneath him, causing an explosion of agony in his chest. He gasped, and the throb intensified into sharp stabs. Over the alarms, he heard a soft moan.

He forced his eyes open and squinted up at the yellow lights running the length of the ceiling. They zig-zagged across his vision as the ship shook. He could feel the bench against his bare back and a silvery emergency blanket wrapped around his upper body. The edge was pulled up past his chin and tickled the bottom of his nose. The jumper jerked enough that his head came up off the bench then slammed back onto the seat.

“What the _hell?_ ” McKay’s voice cut through the sound of what John could only describe as the jumper falling to pieces.

“What…what is going on?” Teyla screamed.

Images flashed through John’s mind. The city ruins, the woods, a man standing over Teyla threatening her child, a woman—an Ancient. Was it real? They’d been on a ship, an Ancient ship, but now they were back in the jumper only John was in the back laid out on the bench and covered in an emergency blanket, not in the pilot’s seat. Why wasn’t he piloting?

“My head is killing me,” McKay moaned.

“Rodney—the jumper. What is wrong?” Teyla cried out.

“I don’t know!”

He’d died. Wasn’t that what the woman—Ibaya—had said? He’d died on the planet, and his team had been transporting his body back to Atlantis when…

“Initial dampeners are out. And engines, and—wait! They’re back!”

The ship stilled, and seconds later, the wailing alarms cut out.

“What happened?” Ronon yelled, and he sounded close. Nearby.

“I…uh…I don’t…I thought we were, um…were we on the planet? I remember being on a planet.”

Home—they had to get home. If Lasbatan was still out there…they had to get out of here. Somewhere safe. He raised his head, looking for Ronon, but dropped it with a gasp when bones grated in his chest. He tensed instinctively, wanting to curl up around the branding iron burning through the center of his chest, but found he couldn’t move. Not even to lift his arm and get Ronon’s attention.

“Ronon, are you alright?” Teyla asked.

“I’m fine,” Ronon said. “I think—” The emergency blanket was suddenly ripped away, and Ronon’s face loomed over John’s. John saw his face morph from confusion to surprise to panic. “Sheppard!”

His eyes dropped from John’s face to his chest and widened. John opened his mouth to talk to him, but all that came out was a soft whistle of air. The pain was alive, writhing around his heart and squeezing the air out of his lungs.

“What happened?” Ronon screamed. He glanced up toward the front of the jumper. “Sheppard’s hurt!”

Darkness was creeping in around the edges of his vision. He felt his finger twitch but nothing more. He blinked, hoping Ronon saw the pleading in his eyes. Something was wrong. Something had happened to them. To him.

He felt Ronon’s warm hand on his shoulder. “Hang on, buddy,” he said. Whatever was wrong with John, it had to be bad, judging by the look on Ronon’s face. The lights in the jumper dimmed, and the effort of keeping his eyes open was too much. He closed them, hearing Teyla yelling at Ronon, Rodney yelling at Atlantis. When the icy touch of the wormhole hit the top of his head, he let himself go.

ooooooooooooooooo

He drifted. Voices floated around him. Teyla, Ronon, Rodney, Keller.

“He is awake! John?”

“Colonel, are you with us?”

“Come on, Sheppard.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s not really awake, Rodney. His body is exhausted and it’s going to take a few days for him to recover. We need to let him rest and come out of this on his own.”

He felt phantom touches pressing against his skin and the voices faded again. Nightmarish images of men in Ancient uniforms bursting through the trees flickered through his mind, knives flashing in the sunlight as they chased John through green woods, through crumbling city ruins, through dark metal corridors with flashing blue panels. An Ancient ship shuddered beneath his bare feet then disappeared in a flash of light and spit him out into the blackness of space.

ooooooooooooooooo

“How is he doing?”

The voice was gentle but clear, and the black void engulfing him snapped to light that shone red through his closed eyelids.

“He’s stable, but the trauma to his chest is severe. He’s got three broken ribs and one cracked one, and his sternum is badly bruised, all consistent with someone who was given CPR—possibly for a prolonged period of time—and yet I can’t find any other injury or trauma that would have necessitated such extensive lifesaving measures.”

Keller. And Carter before that. His chest twinged in response to the doctor’s words but faded quickly under a sea of numbing drugs.

“We’ll know more about his neurological status when he wakes up, but as far as I can tell at this point, there’s no visible brain damage, no problems with his heart or heart rhythm. I can’t explain it. We’re still running more tests…”

The light faded again, and this time there were no hunters or Ancients. No dreams at all. He felt cloth brush against his chest and a pinch in the crook of his arm whenever he moved, but the world stayed mercifully dark.

ooooooooooooooooo

“When is he going to wake up?”

“Stop asking that, McKay.”

“He’s been sleeping for days.”

“Doc said he was exhausted.”

His team. Safe. He remembered vaguely something about them being in danger, but he was home, in Atlantis. He felt the city around him without needing to open his eyes and look at it.

“Do you remember what happened at all? I can almost remember it, like it’s right there in front of me, but as soon as I try to grab a hold of it, it disappears. Something happened—I mean, you don’t just lose six hours without something happening. God, my head hurts. I think I’m getting a headache again. Do you have a headache?”

“I’m getting one now.”

“Shut up.”

ooooooooooooooooo

 _Where was Teyla?_

He was roaming the halls of the Ancient ship when he finally found her. This time the hunters from the forest were chasing her through the empty hallways. John ran toward her, screaming her name until his throat burned but never making a sound. He saw one of the hunters raise his arm, and then a knife flashed through the air as it hurled toward Teyla’s back. He dove and felt a sharp thud as the blade embedded itself up to its hilt in his ribs. Hot red liquid scalded his chest and stomach as blood poured out of the wound around the blade, and he opened his mouth in shock. The blue panels glowed, humming—

Humming. He heard Teyla humming. With a groan, he rolled his head toward her and felt a soft pillow beneath him. Warm sunlight beat against the side of his face, but his eyelids were glued shut.

“John?”

A hand grabbed his, squeezing his fingers, and he felt his fingers curl slightly in a weak grip. The smell of spice and grass wafted around him. Teyla. He tried again to open his eyes and managed to lift his eyebrows, but his eyelids stayed stubbornly shut. A hand brushed against the blankets pulled up to his shoulders.

“Hold on, John. Doctor Keller is coming.”

He became aware of the pain again—not that it had really gone away. He moaned at the sensation of someone or something grounding glass into his chest until the fine particles burrowed all the way through to his back. Moving his mouth to beg for relief, he frowned when no sound came out except the faint smack of his lips.

“He’s awake, but he seems to be having trouble opening his eyes.”

John turned again toward Teyla’s voice, reassured that she was really there by the tight grip on his hand. He heard the rustle of clothing on his other side, and cool fingers pressed against his limp wrist.

“Colonel Sheppard?”

Keller. John rolled his head toward her, breathing heavily through his mouth. The pain in his ribs had amplified.

“Colonel, I know you’re in pain and feeling weak right now, but I need you to look at me. Can you open your eyes?”

He whimpered in response and felt Doctor Keller grab his hand and give it a quick squeeze of encouragement. Air flowed more freely under his nose, and breathing suddenly became a little easier just as he noticed the scratching pull of a plastic tube running along his upper lip.

He frowned again, intent on getting his eyes open, and this time he succeeded in lifting the heavy lids. He saw a blurry face with long brown hair, and the pale blues and whites of the infirmary behind her, before his eyelids slammed closed again.

“Welcome back,” Keller said. She sounded relieved, and John wondered in just how bad a shape he was. “I was starting to think you’d sleep the rest of your life away.”

He felt hands on his face, and a second later, fingers peeled back his eyelids. He groaned at the intrusion of light and turned his head away from the penlight in Keller’s hands, squeezing his eyes closed again as soon as she let go of him. Teyla gripped his hand harder, and he turned toward her. Lethargy swept over him, beckoning him toward sweet darkness.

“Stay with me for a few more minutes, Colonel.”

John sighed, but he pushed the exhaustion back. This time, he managed to open his eyes to slits and keep them open. Keller’s face blurred in and out of focus in front of him.

“Do you know where you are?”

He blinked, letting Keller come into focus before shifting his eyes to the area behind her. Atlantis. Infirmary. He opened his mouth to say yes and frowned when no sound came out. He nodded instead and dragged in a deep breath through the nasal cannula.

“Just relax, Colonel. You’ve been through…um…well, you’ve had a rough couple of days. Do you know who I am?”

He nodded again. It was getting harder to keep his eyes open, and he swallowed against the dryness in his throat. Keller turned at a sound behind her, and when she returned to his side, she had a cup of ice in her hand. She spooned a small chip into his mouth and he closed his eyes as the cool liquid slid down the back of his throat.

“Colonel? Are you still with us?”

He opened his eyes again at Keller’s prodding. The ice chip had eased some of the dryness in his mouth, but the throb in his chest was amping up. He took another deep breath then winced at the sharp stab under his ribs.

“I’ll get you something for the pain in a minute,” Keller said, smiling. She nodded toward Teyla. “Do you know her?”

If John had had the strength, he would have rolled his eyes at the question, but as it was, rolling his eyes would have likely led to closing his eyes, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get them open again. Teyla was smiling at him, but she looked apprehensive, like he wouldn’t remember who she was.

“T’la,” he mumbled, his voice barely audible even to his own ears, but apparently it was enough, or Teyla had read his lips. Her eyes lit up and her grip on his hand tightened.

Keller was pulling the blanket away from his chest and fingering painful bruises but he ignored her and kept his gaze locked on Teyla’s, remembering suddenly the expression of absolute fear frozen on her face. The man, the half-Ancient had had his hand on her stomach digging his fingers into her abdomen. John remembered tackling him, or trying to—passing right through his body like a ghost.

Keller’s exam only took a few minutes, but halfway through it, his ribs were on fire. He took a shaky breath and closed his eyes at the jumble of memories flickering through his mind. Were they real? Had that really happened? It had seemed real a moment before but now… he saw himself lying dead on a table, his chest marred by an array of colorful bruises.

“Do you remember what happened?” Teyla asked, gently.

John blinked. He remembered…he remembered city ruins. A forest. Blue Jell-O panels. Ancients and half-Ancients… Keller pressed a little too hard on one of the bruises and John screwed his face up at the lance of pain that shot through him, stealing his breath away. He swore he’d felt the bones grating against each other. What had happened to him? He didn’t remember anything happening to him.

Keller mumbled an apology, but Teyla was still waiting for him to respond, and he shook his head. “No,” he mouthed.

“You’ve got some broken ribs and bad bruising on your chest,” Keller said, and John shifted his gaze toward the doctor, too tired to actually move his head. She was fiddling with his IV, injecting what he hoped were painkillers into the injection port. “I know you’re in a lot of pain right now, but this should help. The best thing you can do is rest.” She pulled the blankets back up to his shoulders and patted his arm. “I’ll be back to check on you again in a little bit. Teyla, let me now if he needs anything.”

“Of course. Thank you, Jennifer.”

The relief was instantaneous, the fire in his chest doused under the icy flow of the numbing drugs. He felt the tension in his muscles ease, and he sagged into the bed. He heard Teyla shift in her seat next to him and he looked over at her.

“You ‘kay?” he whispered.

“I am fine,” she answered. “Ronon and Rodney as well. We are only worried about you.”

Safe. They were home. He knew it, and yet he couldn’t get let go of the nightmarish image of the Ancient man standing over her, holding his team captive, sucking their souls dry. His eyelids slid closed but he opened them again with a grunt.

Teyla smiled, brushing his hair away from his forehead. “Rest, John. We will be right here with you.”

The medication was thrumming through his system now. Teyla’s face blurred, as did the infirmary behind her, but he felt her tight grip on his fingers and he held onto that as he drifted back to sleep.

ooooooooooooooooo

The next time he woke up, it was dark. A soft light on the stand next to his bed was on but turned away from him. He stared across the dark room, picking out small details. The privacy curtain on his right. A cabinet directly across from him. An empty bed next to that. An unlit wall sconce almost lost in the dark shadows. The sounds were muted as well, but he gradually became aware of soft breathing off to his left and he turned toward it.

His chest jerked at the wrench of pain the movement caused and he groaned. He froze, willing the stabbing throb to die down, but it grew, spreading its ragged tentacles through his entire upper body, down his arms, and up his neck into his head. He clenched his jaw at the pained whimper threatening to slide out and the flip of nausea in his stomach.

“Sheppard?”

Ronon. John heard the chair creak as Ronon sat forward and grabbed his arm. He opened his eyes to see Ronon staring at him with concern. Driven by the sudden urge to reassure the other man he was fine, he opened his mouth to say so and drew in a breath. The staccato beat against his ribcage deepened, and the whimper he’d tried to stifle finally eked its way out in a rush of exhaled air.

“Hold on, buddy,” Ronon whispered, and John could only nod in reply. He watched as the Satedan set the long knife he’d been sharpening down on the nightstand and sprang to his feet. He disappeared before John could blink, but returned a second later. He stared at John a moment then snapped his head toward the dark infirmary at the sound of footsteps clicking across the room.

“He’s awake again,” Ronon announced, and the footsteps echoed away from them. Ronon sat back down in the chair and looked at him. “Don’t move. Doc’s coming.”

John closed his eyes, trying not to breathe too deeply for fear of the pain that would cause but needing more oxygen than he seemed able to pull in. He closed his eyes, focusing on the shallow inhale and exhale that still jarred his chest just enough to keep the pain pulsing at a steady pace. He heard footsteps again, then Keller’s voice.

“Ronon? I thought I told you to go get some sleep. In an actual bed.”

“He’s awake.”

John tried to open his eyes and he managed to work them up part way. He turned toward Keller, gasping at another lance of pain through his broken ribs.

Keller grabbed his wrist and bent closer to him. “Colonel, how are you doing?”

“’urtsss,” he hissed. And it really hurt, worse than it had the last time he’d been awake.

“It’s just about time for another dose. I’ll get something for that in a second.”

She disappeared, replaced a second later by a nurse feeding him ice chips. He sucked on the cold shards, wishing the iciness would travel down his throat to the flames in his chest. Keller returned a few minutes later, fussing over his chart and the monitors.

“Need anything else?” she asked as she finally injected the painkiller in his IV.

John shook his head, continuing to breathe slowly while he waited for the drugs to kick in.

Keller smiled. “I’ll be around here tonight, so just give me a call if you do. Ronon, just a few minutes and then I want you back in your quarters getting some rest.”

“Got it, doc,” Ronon grunted out.

Keller turned John’s limp hand over and wrapped his fingers around the call button before patting his knee and disappearing back into the shadows of the infirmary. The throb was finally starting to ease, and John risked moving again, turning his head slowly toward Ronon. He watched his friend drop back into his seat and pick up his long knife, the blade flashing off the light on the nightstand as he twisted the weapon around in his hand.

Ronon glanced up at him. “You okay?”

John shrugged then winced, his ribs not quite ready for that much movement. “Don’t know,” he whispered. “Think so.”

Ronon nodded, returning his attention to the knife in his hands. It wasn’t one John had seen before. It looked old, but it was polished and sharp, the bone hilt carved in an ornate, intricate pattern.

“What hap’ned?” he asked, frowning at the weak rasp of his voice.

Ronon shrugged, still staring at the flashing metal of the blade as it caught the light. “Not sure,” he finally said. “We were going to check out that old city but…it’s a little hazy. I remember you flying us over the ruins and then I was sitting in the back of the jumper and you were…” He stopped, swallowing, and John saw a flash of anger dance across his face. “You were all bruised up.”

“Everyone okay?”

Ronon looked up at that, the corner of his lip curling into a small smile. “Yeah, we’re fine. We all had headaches the first day and McKay puked a couple of times, but we’re okay.”

“Where…others?” John breathed out. The pain had abated into a dull throb, but speaking wasn’t helping.

“McKay is helping Zelenka with something, and Teyla’s right here.” He thumbed the bed behind him. In the darkness, John hadn’t realized the bed was occupied—hadn’t even noticed the bed, to be honest—but now he could see the faint outline of someone curled up in a ball and sleeping. He saw her flinch, jerking under the covers, and then she settled down again.

“She okay?” John asked. He remembered seeing her when he’d woken up before, but she hadn’t seemed hurt or sick then. Had something happened since then?

“She keeps having nightmares about losing her baby,” Ronon said softly, glancing over at her. “She woke up screaming the first couple of nights, but they’re getting better. Not as intense.”

“No one else hurt?”

Ronon leaned back in his chair, swinging the blade around in his hand with practiced ease. “McKay feels compelled to explain to everyone every science theory he can think of. If he doesn’t quit doing that, he’s going to end up hurt.”

“Sounds like McKay,” John said with a grin. Relief that everyone was, in fact, safe finally hit him, and he relaxed.

“This is worse than normal. Did you know the Wigner-Eckart theorem states that matrix elements of spherical tensor operators, on the basis of angular momentum eigenstates, can be expressed as the product of two factors, one of which is independent of angular momentum orientation and the other of the Clebsch-Gordan coefficient?”

John stared at Ronon, wondering if he’d said that or if it was the product of whatever _very strong drugs_ Keller had just given him. He blinked, opened his mouth to respond, then snapped his jaw shut. What could he say to that?

Ronon sighed. “McKay keeps explaining that one to me,” he said. “He made me repeat it until I could say it back to him perfectly.”

“And you did?”

Ronon shrugged. John probably should have found it amusing, but at the moment it was just…bizarre. He blinked, shifting the conversation. “No one remembers the mission?”

“Vaguely,” Ronon answered. “Not sure what’s real and what’s not. What do you remember?”

What did he remember? _Too much,_ he decided. He remembered the attack in the woods, waking up in Lasbatan’s ship, his conversation with the Ancient, Ibaya. He remembered what Ronon and Rodney had given up for him, and what Teyla had been about to sacrifice. _Way too much._

“Forest, hiking,” he said instead. “Not sure after that.”

Ronon’s eyes were distant as John spoke, otherwise he might have caught on that John remembered more than he was telling, and maybe later, John would tell them most of it. Maybe. Maybe not. Instead, Ronon leaned back in his chair with a nod. He pulled a sharpening stone out of his pocket and ran it along the length of the blade, then held the knife up to the light.

“Did you know my father gave me this? When I was twelve, at my Hala Maret.”

John stifled a sigh of relief that Ronon wasn’t going to push him any more about what might have happened to them, but he raised an eyebrow at the question.

“Hala Maret?” he asked.

“On Sateda, when a boy became a man, his father gave him a gift that symbolized where he was coming from and where he was going. This knife belonged to my grandfather, given to him by his father on his Hala Maret. Found it a couple of years ago when I went back to Sateda.”

“Cool,” John whispered.

“Yeah.”

The drugs were doing their job, and the urge to sleep was back. There seemed no reason to stay awake, and yet Ronon rarely talked of his childhood or his life before he was runner. After what the man had been willing to lose to save John’s life, John couldn’t turn around and fall asleep on him if he needed to talk.

“You are so going to get busted for having a sword in the infirmary,” Rodney said, trying to speak quietly but not really pulling it off.

Ronon grinned, setting the knife to the side, and if he’d been planning on saying more to John about this Hala Maret thing, the moment was gone now. “It’s not a sword, McKay.” He nodded toward John. “Sheppard’s awake.”

John rolled his head toward Rodney, who stood with his hands on his hips at the foot of his bed.

“Really?” he asked, then glanced at John and saw him looking at him. “Oh, hey.”

“Hey.”

“How are you?” he asked, coming around to the other side of the bed and pulling up a chair.

John shrugged but smiled. He’d seen all of his teammates now, proof that they were safe and everyone was fine.

“Do you have a headache?”

“No. Why?”

Rodney shrugged. “Oh, we all had headaches for awhile.”

“Mine’s starting to come back,” Ronon said, but John could hear the grin in his voice.

Rodney didn’t, and he snapped his head up in alarm. “Really? Where’s Keller? We should…” His voice trailed off at Ronon’s snicker, and even John couldn’t help but smile. Rodney scowled. “Oh, wait—I get it. Har har. You’re hysterical. No one’s making you sit here—you’re free to go whenever you want.”

“I’m kidding, McKay.”

“You’re mocking. Kidding involves jokes, where we all laugh. I don’t see anyone laughing right now.”

“McKay?” John called out.

“What?” he snapped, then realized it had been John and not Ronon who’d called him. “Oh, I mean, what?” he asked a little more gently.

“Everything okay?”

Rodney rolled his eyes, relaxing back into the chair and throwing his legs up on the side of John’s bed. “Yeah, everything’s fine. Except you—but you will be fine. Eventually.”

“Sleep, Sheppard. Everyone’s safe,” Ronon added.

John nodded, closing his eyes and squirming in the bed to find a more comfortable position. Keller’s drugs were really working now. He felt a dip on the other side of his bed as Ronon threw his legs up on the mattress.

“Have you ever heard of the Wigner-Eckart theorem? That’s where—”

“Where matrix elements of spherical tensor operators are expressed as the product of two factors?” Ronon finished. “Yeah, you told me about that one already.”

“I did? Oh. What about the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems? That’s where—”

Ronon groaned, cutting him off. John heard him drop his feet to the ground and stand up. “I’m going to bed. Tell Sheppard.”

John heard Ronon pad across the infirmary, and the swish of the doors opening and closing as he left. Rodney was quiet next to him for a moment, but then John heard the physicist lean forward. With a rambling hiss, he launched into the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems and John drifted, riding the wave of calm that flooded through him into a peaceful, soothing sleep.

END

 

 _Prompt:_ "I'd like a story dealing with sacrifice - the team members having to give up something precious in order to save/protect/provide for/honor the others. Think "Gift of the Magi" by O Henry."


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